South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
When one wedding requires 4 outfits, try renting
When the wedding invitation arrived in the spring of 2021, Sonya Patel, an entrepreneur who runs a small spice business in Cleveland, was in a bind.
It was for an Indian wedding, which can span multiple days and require not just a single dress but an entire wardrobe: four outfits, perhaps, for weekendlong festivities; two pairs of shoes; three purses; and bangles and earrings to match.
Patel, 40, usually relied on lehengas, or skirts, and saris purchased by her mother during her regular visits to Jaipur for these events; Patel hadn’t traveled to India herself in more than a decade. But that spring, “no one had gone to India to go shopping” because of COVID19, she said. “I went to try on everything at my mom’s house, and nothing fit. I was in a panic.”
Frantic Google searches led her to Borrow the Bazaar and Preserve, two rental sites specializing in South Asian formalwear. After a flurry of emails and Zoom calls, she chose a white mirrored lehenga from Preserve for the sangeet, a lively pre-wedding celebration. “Afterward, I put it in a box and sent it back and didn’t have to think about it — it was amazing,” Patel said. The cost was $110 for a seven-day rental.
South Asian weddings seem like the perfect occasion for the fashion-rental juggernaut: Traditional attire can be expensive and take months to have custom-made; such delicate pieces can be difficult to clean and store, too. And once a look makes it to Instagram, who wants to be seen in it again?
For many, renting is the next logical solution. Preserve and Borrow the Bazaar, along with sites like AllBorrow and the Pakistani designer-focused Almari360 — all introduced in roughly the past five years — are part of a new generation of businesses trying to solve the logistically challenging and expensive dilemma of dressing for a South Asian wedding.
Rent the Runway, which made borrowed fashion a mainstream fixture, announced in February 2020 that it would start carrying Indian designs by the North Carolina-based label Sani.
“The pieces were completely booked out within 48 hours; then two weeks later, the pandemic hit,” said Niki Shamdasani, who founded Sani with her sister, Ritika. So far the partnership hasn’t expanded beyond a few outfit options, which are often unavailable because they are being rented.
The demand can be high, according to Sonal J. Shah, a New York wedding planner who has overseen nearly 2,000 highend South Asian nuptials in her two-decade career. “Post-COVID, I would say in the U.S. alone there are between 6,000 to 6,500” South Asian weddings per year, she said. (Translation: dresses for nearly 20,000 events.) The average budget for her clients’ multiday extravaganzas, she said, is $350,000 to $400,000, and a designer trousseau can cost as much as $60,000.
“Everybody’s tired of spending thousands of dollars on outfits they only wear once,” said Lindsey Chakraborty, Preserve’s founder and CEO. “In my personal experience, everybody you know is invited to every wedding, so you can’t repeat that same lehenga for another couple of years — and then it’s already out of trend.”
Chakraborty, 36, came up with the idea behind Preserve when she was dating her husband, Shiv, and she found herself shopping for three Indian weddings in one year. “As a basic plus-one guest, I needed 15 outfits,” she said.
Using her background in business, Chakraborty began researching the market and discovered how overlooked it was. The more she researched, the more convinced she was that there was a need for her to intervene. So she put all of her wedding money into Preserve and eloped in August 2021. Since fall 2021, Preserve has attracted more than 1,000 new customers, she said.
Even women who maintain their own Indian wardrobes say they enjoy the freedom of experimentation the rental services provide. “It gives you confidence to try styles you might not try on your own,” Patel said. “I rent outfits that are way more fashion-forward that I would never in my life purchase.”