GENERATION RENT
One writer spends a week road-testing fashion’s booming trend: hiring high-end clothing
Hiring new-season pieces, rather than forking out the money to own them, is now a booming market. Think it sounds too good to be true? One writer spends a week wearing a whole new wardrobe to find out
I don’t make a habit of wearing Chanel to go for a cuppa. But here I am, on a weekday afternoon, being treated to a belated birthday tea by my best friend, wearing the kind of Chanel jacket more appropriate for, say, the Champs-Élysées than an east London restaurant (one populated by bearded men with laptops). Under the Chanel is something even more incongruous – a classic Alaïa dress. Though I’m not sure how the King of Cling would feel about me combining it with a pair of Adidas dad trainers.
None of these clothes are my own; I agreed with ELLE to spend a week wearing rented items and this is my first outing. If I bought these pieces myself, I would need to part with £5,OOO. Minimum. Instead, for the privilege of wearing them this afternoon, I have the much more palatable, though still not insubstantial, bill of £3O9 (between £39 and £11O per piece). These come from Front Row, a service that rents clothes and accessories from high-end designers. It’s just one of a number of sites in the rental clothing market, from American powerhouses Armarium and Rent the Runway to UK-based company Girl Meets Dress and Panoply from Paris. The theory? You get to live the dream for a limited time only, while keeping your bank balance looking a little healthier to pay for things like food and, you know, keeping a roof over your head.
The rental market is seen as the future of fashion. Last year, the CEO and founder of Rent The Runway Jennifer Hyman said, ‘I plan to put Zara out of business,’ arguing that for the same price as a Zara dress, a customer could rent a designer item, elevating their wardrobe, even if only for 24 hours. The idea fits with wider trends of how we consume now – quickly, digitally and on demand. We ‘rent’ music on Spotify. We share journeys home using Uber Pool. We stream films on Netflix rather than buying DVDs, resell unwanted clothes on eBay and rent our flats on Airbnb. Renting clothes is the next step in our ‘cloud’ lifestyles; the tangible is overrated, clearly. Here, the twin factors of experience – the bucket-list moment of wearing an Alaïa dress in my case – and smartphone-based convenience converge, finding a sweet spot. ‘People realise that experience and time are the most precious commodities we have,’ says the founder of Girl Meets Dress