A Closet In The Cloud: Is Fashion To Rent The Future of Retail?

In 2018 MakeSpace, a storage company, found that half of the surveyed Americans ‘would be celibate’ if it meant more closet space. ClosetMaid found that over 40% of Americans are willing to pay additional monthly rent fees for more closet space. And, this begs the question: given that I don’t want to get up and move to a new place, how can I get more storage space without uprooting my life?

The digitisation of our lives makes a minimalistic lifestyle more realistic. Fewer millennials are buying houses than their baby-boomer parents. Spotify libraries are making CD collections obsolete. Treasured family photo albums are evaporating into Dropbox Cloud accounts. Are we not to assume that our culture of tech-inspired minimalism won’t also impact our closets?

Businesses like Rent the Runway (RTR), Armoire and Mr Collection are recognizing that there are some items that customers don’t see the value of owning, often because they are pricey, trend-driven and seasonal.

These retail rentals act as subscription services. They are the Dropbox for your closet. The customer looks through a digital closet of varied brands, selects the items they like and orders them on a subscription basis with the ability to swap some items throughout the month. At the end of the month subscribers may find new clothes in their digital closets, package the old ones away and ship them back into the “cloud” (read: warehouse).

These fashion rentals offer different types of subscription services based on the value and quantity of clothes you’re renting, the variety of designers available to you, and how many times you’re likely to swap items within the month.

Could I seriously save money?

On RTR, prices start at $69, but on average, fashion rentals come at high prices, usually starting at just under $100 a month. However, considering that 29% of Americans will spend up to $100 per month on online shopping for clothes, this price point seems perfect for those who prefer to stay up-to-date with trends. In fact, this alternative form of ‘shopping’ turns out to be more convenient for Americans since 52% of them prefer to shop for their clothes online anyway.

The business has been so successful that the clothing rental market is expected to grow by $1.85 billion by 2023. Global retail companies such as Urban Outfitters and American Eagle have expanded into the rental market, offering their own brands for rent. Other traditional fashion retailers to follow have been Ann Taylor, Express and American Eagle.

Is this sustainable?

The concept was introduced to make high-end brands more accessible luxuries, however, with the entrance of giant high-street players such as Urban Outfitters, the space has become a gateway towards sustainable consumption and exploration of personal style; a bid to appeal to more ‘conscious’ consumers.

As Amibka Singh, CEO at Armoire, said in a video interview: “[We are] like a mythical dream closet, eternally overflowing and self-updating.”

Sustainability in the fashion space has been a long-overlooked issue and perhaps this is finally the solution to the seemingly endless problems presented by fast-fashion. While clothing rentals are aimed at trend-setters and fashion gurus, when we look at the breakdown of these subscriptions versus traditional retail consumption, it becomes clear that this may be a more financially responsible way to consume retail, as well as, being a more sustainable way of consumption.

Research shows that on average an adult American will spend just over $3500 on retail shopping in a year, and 77% of them reported returning a quarter of the clothes they buy. In the UK, £46.7 billion worth of clothing is stored away in closets, never to be worn.

According to Elizabeth L. Cline, the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, we only wear our clothes 7 times on average before discarding them.

After this period, the average consumer will throw away 70 pounds of clothing per year, adding to the 13 million tons of textile waste each year. Rental clothing solves another devastating issue which Louis Vuitton and Burberry have been notoriously guilty of: the burning of unsold items, and the textile waste during production, all in the name of luxury and exclusivity.

Singh confirmed this problem and said that Armoire aims to solve it. She said: “On average about 15 different women will wear one item [on lease]. When the items are no longer great quality, Armoire will donate the clothes.”

Whereas, only 30% of consumers who own their clothes will donate or recycle them. Instead their items will end up at landfill, left to degrade and emit greenhouse gases.

How hygienic is this, anyway?

Admittedly, fashion for rent comes with its own basket of problems such as excessive use of energy & chemicals for dry-cleaning as well as, the carbon footprint of delivery & returns, however, the impact of dry cleaners pollution is less impactful on ecosystems than the water pollution that occurs during the sourcing and dyeing of high street items.

Dry cleaning is, however, still a downside to consider when supporting the rental industry. However, on the bright side, this may reduce your own water consumption through doing less laundry.

Maureen Sullivan, COO of RTR, in an interview with TODAY said: “There is no stain we have not yet encountered [and not fixed]. We may be the world’s largest dry cleaners.”

Upon return items are taken through a massive dry-cleaners. The fashion warehouses assess the clothes for damage, run them through treatments if items have stains, and laundry and iron them. The clothes return to the rack labelled and ready to continue on their journeys like brand new.

So, are closets in the Cloud the future of retail? Perhaps. Fashion rentals have taken off so rapidly that there is no doubt they could someday replace regular high-street shopping. Renting clothes as opposed to owning them teaches us more conscious ways of consumption; let’s us experiment with style at no cost to the environment; and opens up possibilities for better space management. It perfectly fits into the notion of a capsule wardrobe, a trend which came about almost a decade ago and rode the wave of the minimalist lifestyle. Ultimately, if you want to be a well-dressed minimalist, you can’t do it without fashion rentals!