The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has crippled fashion houses, many of whom have paused production. The industry’s surplus issue has long been a talking point, and in recent years, people have turned to the (now-booming) rental and resale economy market for possible solutions.
Good fashion, unlike fresh produce, has no expiration date. But one mightn’t realise this given the mountains of product the clothing industry churns out, much of which barely gets worn before disposal. Unsustainable levels of production and waste have become talking points across trades such as agriculture and technology, and fashion is no exception.
In recent years, advances in e-commerce logistics and diminished stigma around past-season/pre-loved fashion have allowed rental and resale to emerge as (supposedly) sustainable competitors to traditional retail. Pre-loved designer site The RealReal, for example, made headlines last June when it raised an impressive USD$300 million IPO. Meanwhile, a 2019 MarketWatch report forecast that the global fashion rental market would command USD$1.96 billion by 2023.
Pre-pandemic, conventional retailers were also hopping onboard the rental/resale bandwagons, via collaborative pop-ups or new in-house services. In the past year alone, rental company HURR announced a six-month residency at London’s iconic Selfridges; American department store Nordstrom launched its resale arm, See You Tomorrow; and Gen Z lifestyle emporium Urban Outfitters introduced its Nuuly rental service to much press fanfare.
Rental and resale are clearly global fashion phenomena, spanning different cultures and market levels. But are they really as great as they seem, and could they plausibly supplant off-the-rack as the predominant mode of dressing ourselves?
Seeing green
Although the resale market as we know it today has precedents in vintage stores and third-party platforms such as eBay, fashion rental services are a less familiar model. Both, however, share the appeals of authentication (particularly for designer or luxury goods), curation, and standardised pricing, streamlining shopping for clients.
“Trust… is one of our core founding principles and is central to everything that we do” Vestiaire Collective co-founder Sophie Hersan tells Forbes. Her philosophy is common among competitors for whom credibility is an indispensable business tool.
Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Hyman shared in a Bloomberg interview that, in the absence of traditional advertising or marketing, 95% of the rental company’s clientele is attributable to word-of-mouth. Sneaker marketplace StockX, meanwhile, bolstered consumer goodwill after Kobe Bryant’s death, when it restricted opportunistic price surges on the late basketballer’s Nike and Adidas collaborations.
All this transparency is well and good, but doesn’t come anywhere close to explaining soaring interest in fashion rental and resale. The major allure of fashion rental and resale is, instead, their purported eco-friendliness. Proponents allege that they divert products from landfills and prolong their lifespan. Some media outlets have even seductively positioned them as missing links in a circular fashion economy.
This is technically inaccurate, as circularity cannot exist without the final stage of recycling items into raw materials. Although this precludes a trendily circular rag trade, purchasing pre-loved clothing or crowd-sharing a closet can indeed challenge our preconceptions about disposability.
Increased conscientious consumption is not, however, a guaranteed outcome. The reality is far more complex than the superlative-prone press would have us believe.
The true cost
When it comes to fashion resale and rental, it’s vital to understand the difference between preventative and curative action. The former proactively addresses the root cause of a problem, in this case fashion’s sizable carbon footprint. The latter, on the other hand, merely addresses the symptoms.
Resale and rental are curative solutions.
Resellers like The RealReal and Vestiaire Collective aim to find new homes for pre-loved designer goods. If unwanted cocktail dresses were puppies, these businesses would be animal shelters. The purpose of their business is not — and to be fair, doesn’t claim to be — putting an end to puppy mills (fashion’s notorious deadstock issue) or irresponsible pet ownership (our throwaway “wear it once, just for the ‘Gram” culture).
Shopping on resale sites ensures that existing clothing doesn’t go to waste, which is obviously a good thing. But the only way to meaningfully prevent waste is at its point of origin i.e. the manufacturing process. By purchasing fewer items and shopping less often, we can economically pressure brands into reducing their output. The mind-bogglingly large inventories of Vestiaire Collective etc. indicate, sadly, that we’ve still a long way to go.
Rental services, on the other hand, are saddled with other shortcomings. While these companies do theoretically keep unwanted — at least in any permanent, single-owner sense — clothes in circulation, the logistics behind crowd-sharing can be polluting.
Transport and single-use packaging (cardboard shipping boxes, plastic garment bags etc.) remain typical features of the fashion rental experience. Given that frequent loans and returns are key selling points, rental services’ carbon footprint potentially rivals that of conventional e-commerce. In addition, clothing and even accessories like earrings need to be thoroughly cleaned after each use. For prudence, most rental services indiscriminately dry clean garments even if they haven’t been worn, and this wasteful practice won’t going anywhere in a post-COVID world.
Eco-friendly? Not quite.
Then there’s the thorny question of how rental services’ commitment-free, novelty-fueled business models might actually make clothing seem more disposable, at least from a wearer’s perspective. In a widely-shared Business of Fashion op-ed, Eugene Rabkin argued that “there is something positive to be said about being attached to material things… With renting you don’t hold on to anything. The clothes you rent mean little, nor do you particularly care for them.”
The sharing economy has been accused of degrading everything from full-time employment (think of TaskRabbit and Uber, which offer workers few rights and protections), to intellectual property (virtually no musicians make money from Spotify streaming), and even relationships (yes, dating apps count as part of the sharing economy). It’s hard not to see rental services as having a similar, if totally unintended, effect on the fashion that we claim to love and covet.
How can we reconcile the appealing convenience of fashion resale and rental services with larger social and environmental concerns? Well, maybe think of it this way: rental and resale may not be the silver bullets that save the fashion industry or planet from ruin. They can, though, supplement a concerted shift towards decreased and discerning consumption.
In Yves Saint Laurent’s immortal words: “Fashions fade, style is eternal”. Were he alive in the woke 2020s, he might have thoughtfully added that material fashion objects should lie somewhere in between.
This story was originally featured in A Magazine, published by Apical Media.
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