The game is divided into 12 rounds, or "months" -- and that year into four seasons. In the first two months of each season, you place three workers at various spaces around the board: hiring workers for your firm, buying real estate from retail stores to warehouses, purchasing fabric, and acquiring fashion designs. In the third month, you must exhibit one or more looks at a fashion show. Each look requires two fabric tokens of different colors (out of six possible colors). You earn money and prestige by up to four different metrics: the Trend of your looks, their Quality, your PR presence, or the sheer quantity of looks you showed.
Early in the game, the first exhibition season brings just one fashion show in which all four categories are scored. As later seasons come, there are more shows each time -- but fewer categories in which they score. You have to focus on what's going to be important in the next season, while being mindful that you have only two rounds (six actions) to prep each time.
It sounds pretty straightforward... but the rules actually feel a few notches more complex than they need to be. I was reminded somewhat of the board games Vinhos and Viticulture -- both about wine, but the former considerably more complicated than the latter, and not actually better for it. Prêt-à-Porter feels like the more complex version of a simpler fashion game, incorporating a few too many elements compared to something else that might exist out there somewhere.
Take the money management. You have to "make payroll" and "pay rent" on your buildings; if you can't, you end up taking out a loan you'll have to pay back with interest. That's all fine. But you can't just take the automatic loan for voluntary expenditures like buying new fabric. In that case, you must spend an action to go to a bank space and "take out a line of credit," essentially a different form of loan -- payable on the same time frame, but with a slightly better interest rate and multiple terms to choose from. To me, the game really doesn't feel like it needs the subtle differentiation of these two elements.
Or take the way you buy cloth in the game. There are three different areas of the board you can do it, a "local supplier" from which you can get as much as you wish of a single color, a "warehouse" from which you can buy just one token each in any or all of the six colors (at a higher price), or a "foreign supplier" that is back on the as-much-of-one-color method (but at the highest prices of all). Each purchase comes with varying numbers of Quality tokens, one of the facets on which you're judged in a fashion show. But when you only have six actions to take before each show, you really don't wind up spending too many of them to pick up fabric. Furthermore, there are lots of cards you can pick up that cheat the buying in one way or another. The long and short of it? There's not as much competition for these spaces as you'd think, and so it seems like all the mixed-up ways of acquiring the fabric aren't entirely necessary.
And about those cards? They really seem to break the game wide open. I could grouse about this particular card or that one; no doubt a different group of players would argue that these cards are the ones that are really imbalanced. My point is that each card does a lot, creating huge work-arounds of the game's core rules, and enabling wildly powerful engines for you to lean into as a strategy. The core mechanics don't really get a chance to shine -- which is a shame, because explaining them the first time you play is rather complex. Instead, the game feels like before the halfway point, it has devolved into a competition of who can abuse the card they picked up more thoroughly.
Now, if you're the one who masters that abuse? Prêt-à-Porter can provide a few thrills. And like I said, the theme is novel. But even dressed up in "fashion," it's still a worker placement game at the core, and one I found far less polished than others in the genre. I give the game a C+.
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