Is Fashion Rental Our Future?

THREADS writer Daisy Riley weighs up the pros and cons of fashion’s latest industrial saviour: the rental market.

With so many fashion rental sites popping up all over the internet, I can’t help but wonder whether this really is the future or just a quick fix.

Thinking about it, fashion rental isn’t really the new gimmick it may seem. Celebrities have rented and borrowed clothing through their stylists and brand partnerships for forever — that’s how they pull off look after look with such grace.

As for us regular folk, the rental game has been on our field for a good few years now, but it hasn’t quite taken off into the mainstream yet.

What is the offering?

Well, it’s a pretty varied one. There are peer-to-peer platforms like Loanhood, By Rotation or Hurr, on which you can upload and rent out your own clothes, and borrow from others around you.

There are also bigger sites like Rotato with their own warehouses full of designer pieces that they loan out to customers. Other sites have membership schemes, for example Onloan, which lets members hire 2 pieces a month for just £69. Selfridges jumping on the band wagon with their own rental service was quite a pivotal moment.

“Thinking about it, fashion rental isn’t really the new gimmick it may seem.”

And the numbers are big too, as reported by GlobalData in 2022: “the UK rental apparel market is forecast to be worth £142m by the end of the year, with growth of 62% in 2023 and 164% predicted in the following years to 2026.”

So the big dogs are interested, and customers have plenty of options. But are we buying it?

What do customers think of fashion rental?

There are a lot of benefits, and equally a lot of issues. Customers either absolutely swear by it or hate it.

When you think about it as an option for an event it seems like a saving grace: designer items for a fraction of the price, without taking up space in the closet or ending up in landfill. But then you remember how amazing it is to own that prom dress or wedding dress, to show it to your children and pass it down through the family. 

We know that our current mindset towards clothing — need it now/bored of it the next minute — needs to change. ASAP. But will rental be the golden, rather than the green, ticket?

What are the pros of fashion rental?

For one, the items are cheaper: beautiful designer pieces suddenly become accessible to a lot of people when they’re available at rental prices. Talking about the “rental revolution”, founder of By Rotation, Eshita Kabra-Davies spoke in an interview last year on why this is one of her favourite aspects of the rental revolution:

“One of the things I love about our app is that users are not influencers and celebrities and stylists, but regular, working professionals. One of our Super Rotators is a mother of twins, in her 40s. She’s a maths teacher and just received an OBE. Of course, she wore a rented piece to collect it and looked incredible.”

I already mentioned that renting will save you storage space, but while it lets your wardrobe stay small, it also actually opens it up to so many more new looks. We all want to jump on the latest micro trend, hit an event in something show-stopping, or just get some insta pics in an outfit that our friends haven’t seen before — and rental allows us to do this in a really fun and easy way!

Now let's get onto the serious side. The UK is the fourth largest textile waster in the UK, and even as we make an effort to keep items for longer, the vast amounts of natural resources that go into producing new clothing is shocking. If 20 people bought a new pair of jeans, each pair would have used 7,800 litres of water in its production. Now imagine if those 20 people took turns renting that pair of jeans.

Resale is another amazing offering which presents fashion with a new future, but it needs to be done mindfully. Buying fast fashion with the mindset that you can “just donate it afterwards” is simply a falsity. Charity shops and overseas resale markets are absolutely overrun with cheap rubbish that no one wants to buy — it’s ending up in landfills and clogging up the markets that many people rely on to survive. Rental, however, seems to solve that problem. Some sites finally sell the items when they are too worn to keep renting out, and there’s always the opportunity for a sustainable end-of-life destination for hired items — if their owners take steps to get them there.

What are the cons of fashion rental?

Let’s get into it, because rental fashion is not the catch-all that it may seem either.

For one, its accessibility is an issue. Price-wise, renting designer clothing is still pretty out of reach for some people and can easily add up. But also physically, not every fashion rental site offers a full size range or an adaptable range for those with disabilities. Geographical accessibility can be an issue too, with products that require collecting and dropping off excluding potential customers who live out of catchment. 

“Buying fast fashion with the mindset that you can ‘just donate it afterwards’ is simply a falsity.”

And as easy as it is in theory, rental can become a little time consuming: the finding, the renting, the wearing, the cleaning, the packing, the posting, etc. When you compare it to one click on a website that has all your card info and address memorised, and will deliver to you within 24 hours — it really can’t compete.

And with regard to sustainability, even though it offers more use and less waste, the majority of rental pieces are not from sustainable brands, which means that you’ll still be wearing something which required harmful chemicals and potentially mistreated labour to be made.  It's a bit of a grey area, but can you really feel ethically above reproach, or at least have a clear conscience, if you know that the dress you’re wearing was made in this way, despite you acquiring it via more ethical means by renting it?

And finally, there’s the practical element. Some people just don’t like the idea of renting their clothes. Maybe it grosses them out that someone wore them before; maybe the stress of wearing something borrowed would send them into an anxious mess; or maybe some people just like to own their own stuff. All of which is totally valid.

So is it the future?

Honestly, I think it might be.

That isn’t to say that in the future everything we wear will be rented, the whole of the fashion industry will be circular and no one will own their own clothes.

But rental fashion provides another choice, just like resale and learning to make your own clothing. The giant lumbering body of the fashion monster needs us to see that there are other options, if it’s ever going to be put to rights. 

What we truly need is to change our attitude towards clothes, change the desires that we feel towards them, and the overwhelming need to consume that we’ve been taught to live by. Fashion rental is such a huge turntable in that thought process, prompting us to look around for other options, to slow down and to think about our actions. And that changing mindset is the only way that fashion will ever slow down.

There’s lots of pros and lots of cons to the idea of renting your wardrobe, and it all comes down to personal preference. But isn’t that refreshing? Knowing that you actually have a choice in the way that you shop, instead of having adverts for the lasts pieces, that you absolutely need to own, shoved down your throat by world-famous models? Instead, you can pay a peer a small price to borrow something of theirs. It feels personal, and it feels a lot more thoughtful.

And I believe that it’s a huge first step in changing the way that we dress ourselves, and think about fashion.

credits

words — daisy riley

photography — andrej lisakov

design — karina so.