Will Renting Clothes Really Make Our Wardrobes More Sustainable?
2019 was a watershed year for fashion. Along with viral polka dot dresses and handbags the size of Tic Tacs, it was the year we all woke up to the devastating environmental impact being wrought by microfibres, textile waste, and our voracious appetite for fast fashion.
In the UK, we buy more clothes per person than anywhere in Europe, with 300,000 tonnes of it ending up in landfill each year. Where our mothers would spend months saving for a special dress, we now shop unthinkingly for any social occasion, sometimes at ungodly hours, from the comfort of our own bed.
With the climate emergency looming large in our collective conscience, we’re all looking to shop more mindfully – and now, a slew of new fashion rental companies is offering to help us.
From peer-to-peer rental platforms such as HURR Collective and By Rotation (think Depop, but for renting), to subscription-based rental sites like Onloan, Cocoon and My Wardrobe HQ, a groundswell of fashion rental platforms has emerged, offering everything from everyday clothing to designer dresses, handbags and accessories.
According to GlobalData, the UK rental market is expected to grow more than fivefold to £2.3bn by 2029 from an estimated £400m last year. Even retailers have cottoned on, with H&M in Stockholm trialling a clothing rental scheme for members of its customer loyalty program and Ganni launching its own ‘Ganni Repeat’ rental service to its customers in Denmark.
A post shared by Renting à la mode (@hurr) on Oct 17, 2019 at 5:55am PDT
While the concept of renting clothes isn’t new - men have been hiring suits for years and special occasion dresses have similarly long been available to rent - what is new is the way that fashion is being touted as the next frontier in our sharing economy, with these companies hoping to become the Spotify or Airbnb of the fashion world.
‘I think it's a really great idea in terms of helping people transition from feeling like they have to own something, to realising that they can enjoy something without necessarily having to possess it,’ says Lauren Bravo, journalist and author of How To Break Up With Fast Fashion.
There’s a lot to like about the idea of renting clothing – the chance to dip your toes into a new trend without the commitment or guilt of buying, being able to borrow something that might otherwise be unattainable (can’t afford a Dior Saddle bag? Well maybe you can for £60 per evening), and ultimately extending the lifecycle of the item.
But while ‘Rent your wardrobe!’ has become editors’ new clarion call, it begs the question, is it actually the catch-all answer to our fast fashion problem?
For one, the majority of rental sites are still skewed towards a certain customer. If you’re a size UK 6-10 and based in central London then you have a far wider range of options than say a size UK 16 living outside a major city, and you’d still need a certain amount of disposable income to pay for Onloan’s £69 monthly subscription fee or £124 on HURR’s Rejina Pyo dress.
Then there’s the small matter of rental companies’ environmental footprint. Their green credentials don’t seem so impeccable once you tally up all the dry-cleaning, packaging and transportation involved, which has to be repeated each time a garment has been rented.
US company Rent the Runway, which launched in 2009 and is now valued at $1 billion, is the single largest dry cleaner in the world, processing a whopping 2,000 items per hour. If we all start furiously renting and laundering, with these garments ricocheting miles and miles between wearers, is the effect all that dissimilar to endlessly buying from and returning goods to online retailers?
A post shared by Rent the Runway (@renttherunway) on Dec 2, 2019 at 3:58pm PST
‘I think the solution is to start thinking on a local as opposed to a global scale,’ says Dana Thomas, veteran fashion journalist and author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. She says green dry cleaning is another option. ‘Just stop and think, we've been making these suits for a really long time, so what did we do before dry cleaning? I think there are solutions that are not toxic for the planet, but we're so used to doing things a certain way that it's hard to break our habits.’
Some rental companies have made efforts to minimise their carbon footprint. HURR Collective items can be delivered using the green cycle courier service Pedals (albeit only in London) while Rotaro, launched by former WGSN trend forecaster Georgie Hyatt at the end of last year, uses carbon-neutral DPD, the leader in sustainable delivery in the UK, as well as recyclable tissue paper to wrap up the garments and biodegradable packaging made out of corn starch. They also use “wet-washing” to launder the garments which uses detergent that is plant-based and toxin free, making it a more sustainable alternative to dry-cleaning.
What’s more, majority of Rotaro’s dresses, by of-the-moment brands such as Batsheva and Cecilie Bahnsen, hover between £30-50 to rent, making them in line with your average Zara purchase. ‘I think as humans we are just naturally inclined to seek out newness and use clothing as a form of expression and I don't think that's really something that's ever going to go away,’ says Hyatt. ‘Fast fashion's so cheap and affordable and I want rental to be an achievable alternative.’
But though renting may offer the dopamine-hit of the new without the risk of it collecting dust in your wardrobe, it also does nothing to discourage the throwaway relationship we have developed with clothes. By giving us access to an ever-rotating wardrobe, isn’t rental only helping to fuel our incessant demand for the latest must-have item? What if we just broke the taboo of outfit-repeating that’s plagued us for so long, and learnt to re-wear our best dresses with pride?
‘I think it would be naïve to say that people need to start wearing all of their fanciest, glitziest partywear down to Tesco to get more use out of it,’ says Bravo, ‘but I definitely think we need to end this madness around not repeating outfits for weddings and things like that. I think we have to take our lead from men and remember that they just wear the same suit again and again and nobody notices or cares.’
‘In a well-balanced system, renting is absolutely ideal,’ says Orsola de Castro, co-founder of Fashion Revolution, a non-profit global movement campaigning for reform within the fashion industry. ‘But if renting needs to compete with the way that we operate today and therefore become enormous, it will solve nothing.’
‘In the end, there is only one solution and that is to slow down the industry at source. We need to see an industry which radically slows down mass production, radically discourages mass consumption and rapidly encourages renting, re-sale, mending, up-cycling and recycling.’
The key is to see rental as one part of the solution, rather than the answer to all our eco-sins. But even if renting can help wean us off needlessly buying more clothes in the future, the simplest and best path to sustainability is to maybe, just maybe, consider wearing what’s already in your wardrobe. A radical idea perhaps, but one we can all try.
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