In continuum mechanics, a material is said to be under plane stress if the stress vector is zero across a particular plane. When that situation occurs over an entire element of a structure, as is often the case for thin plates, the stress analysis is considerably simplified, as the stress state can be represented by a tensor of dimension 2 (representable as a 2×2 matrix rather than 3×3).  A related notion, plane strain, is often applicable to very thick members.
Plane stress typically occurs in thin flat plates that are acted upon only by load forces that are parallel to them.  In certain situations, a gently curved thin plate may also be assumed to have plane stress for the purpose of stress analysis. This is the case, for example, of a thin-walled cylinder filled with a fluid under pressure.  In such cases, stress components perpendicular to the plate are negligible compared to those parallel to it.
In other situations, however, the bending stress of a thin plate cannot be neglected. One can still simplify the analysis by using a two-dimensional domain, but the plane stress tensor at each point must be complemented with bending terms.