Tailors on Savile Row have lost a battle to ensure that the word “bespoke” is used only to refer to handmade suits.

For more than 200 years, the tailors have zealously defended the term, which is derived from the practice that customers would “speak” for a particular piece of cloth.

Clients have at least four fittings for a traditional bespoke suit, at which dozens of measurements are taken. Tailors then spend at least 50 hours hand-stitching and finishing the garment.

Such lavish care has long been synonymous with the best of British craftsmanship and the suits can sell for upward of about $10,000.

However, the Advertising Standards Authority has cast centuries of tradition aside by saying that most modern customers do not understand the difference between a bespoke suit and one that is made to measure.

It has dismissed a complaint that it is misleading to label as bespoke suits that have been machine-cut from a template.

The watchdog made the ruling after receiving a complaint that Sartoriani, a London-based menswear retailer, had misled customers by offering a “bespoke” suit for approximately $1,000.

The outfits were actually machine-cut abroad, after initial measurements were taken, and adjusted at the end of the process. Sartoriani said it did not mislead customers and told them the Italian-cloth suits were machine-cut in Germany. According to the ASA adjudication, Sartoriani “asserted that their target customers would see ‘bespoke’ and ‘made to measure’ as synonymous, meaning ‘made for you.'”

Sartoriani argued that no one buying a suit costing $1,000 would fool themselves into thinking that they were buying a bespoke suit made to the exacting standards of Savile Row.

The ASA noted “that the advertised suits should be described, at best, as ‘made to measure’.” But it concluded: “We considered that the majority of people, however, would not expect that suit to be fully handmade with the pattern cut from scratch. We concluded that the use of the word ‘bespoke’ to describe the advertised suits was unlikely to mislead.”

Mr. Sartoriani called the decision a victory for “affordable luxury.”

Savile Row tailors, who have already set up a trade association called Savile Row Bespoke “to protect and develop” traditional practices, reacted with dismay.

The chairman of Savile Row Bespoke and chief executive of Gieves & Hawkes, Mark Henderson, accused the ASA of making a judgment not based on “valid or rational argument.” He added: “The fact that a company like Sartoriani can claim to make bespoke suits and state their address as Savile Row is potentially misleading. It leads consumers to think that a machine-made suit can substitute the experience, craftsmanship, and expertise that goes into creating a Savile Row bespoke suit, which it cannot.”