If a piece doesn’t work out, it goes not to a landfill but to another user, and another, and another.Ī hundred and fifty-nine dollars a month adds up to one thousand nine hundred and eight dollars a year. Customers are encouraged to play with their style without guilt. So is the idea of dressing for day versus night, or of what makes a January outfit versus a July outfit, or of what’s appropriate for a twenty-year-old versus for a fifty-year-old.” With its subscription service, Rent the Runway has created an unusual hybrid of fast fashion and luxury, offering speed, variety, and that dopamine hit that comes from buying something new plus the seductive tingle of leaving the house in something expensive. The concept of work dressing versus casual dressing is gone in a lot of fields. “There’s the over-all demolition of every old rule you can think of about how people should dress. “Lots of forces are disrupting the fashion world right now,” Cindi Leive, the former editor of Glamour, told me. Styles go by-too cheesy, too skimpy, too random, too reasonably priced to waste a rental on-and then: a billowy floral Marni skirt ($1,140 “ TO DIE FOR,” according to one reviewer), or a sporty Vince day-to-night number ($375 “glamorous & comfortable”) to pair with a bold Oscar de la Renta tulip necklace ($990 “Walked around like Princess Diana with it”). If I’m going to be an analogy to food, I want to be your meat and potatoes.”īy the end of this year, Rent the Runway will offer fifteen thousand styles by more than five hundred designers, with a total inventory of eight hundred thousand units, stored in what Hyman calls “the closet in the cloud.” Browsing that inventory on its Web site, or scrolling through its app, can feel like bobbing for apples in the sea. She was saying that Rent the Runway was a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. “But after I eat the sundae I feel really fat, and I don’t want to have another one.” Hyman said, “For me, that was a eureka moment. It makes me feel awesome,” the woman said. At a focus group held in Washington, D.C., Hyman spoke with a customer who compared Rent the Runway to an ice-cream sundae. The company tried offering a subscription service for handbags and accessories, but it fell flat. ![]() A dress was delivered in two sizes, returned by prepaid shipping label to the company’s warehouse, dry-cleaned, and sent out to the next wearer.Ī few years ago, Hyman thought hard about how to expand the business. Why should a woman spend a fortune on a gown that she’ll probably never wear again? Rent the Runway gave women access to designer dresses for a fraction of the sticker price. Men have long been able to rent tuxedos for black-tie events. Hyman founded Rent the Runway in 2008 with Jenny Fleiss, while both were in their second year at Harvard Business School. Prices are low enough to nudge customers to buy that bedazzled leopard-print cape to wear out on Saturday night, even if it ends up at Goodwill on Sunday morning. If you take a few days to mull over a possible purchase, it may well be gone by the time you return. Its business relies on both the fact of surplus and the impression of scarcity. Inditex, the Spanish company that owns Zara, is the biggest clothing retailer in the world, and produces 1.5 billion items a year. Each year, as Hyman is fond of pointing out, the average American buys sixty-eight items of clothing, eighty per cent of which are seldom worn twenty per cent of what the $2.4-trillion global fashion industry generates is thrown away.Ĭhief among the culprits here are fast-fashion businesses like Zara and H&M, which flood their stores with a constantly renewed selection of cheaply manufactured styles cribbed from high-end designers. “Every woman has the feeling of opening up her closet and seeing the dozens of dead dresses that she’s worn only once,” she told me recently. Even so, the weeds are starting to choke the garden.Īccording to Jennifer Hyman, the C.E.O. The return window closed long ago that’s seventy-nine dollars added to my open tab of sartorial bets made and lost, joining the expensive brocade palazzo pants I wore to a fancy function and then forgot about, and the mom jeans that I got on a trip to Stockholm, where they seemed safely on the hip side of hideous. At home, my unsparing mirror told the truth: I was Big Bird with pockets. In the dressing room, I thought that it made me look cheerful, like a modest yet sexy daffodil. It is also bright yellow, somewhere between ripe banana and free-range egg yolk. The dress is a hundred per cent cotton, midi length, and belted at the waist. ![]() I bought it at Zara last April, in a flush of springtime optimism. At the back of my narrow New York City closet, squished between a thick sweater that has gone ignored since last winter and a long-retired pair of floral-print jeans, is a dress that I have never worn.
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