Rent, Wear, Repeat: How Rental Clothes Impact Personal Style
Rent, Wear, Repeat: How Rental Clothes Impact Personal Style
By Emma Williams — November 6, 2024
While renting clothes creates freedom to explore individual styles, its mass-market scale prompts thousands of wardrobes to look the same.
Shelves are no longer piled high with favorite pieces. Instead, Rent The Runway bags and shipping labels litter closet floors. In this day and age, almost nothing we wear is really ours.
‘One-and-done’ culture has always been around, and for a good reason. Of course, everyone wants to pick out a new outfit for a function, interview, or special occasion—who wouldn’t want to have that exciting feeling of newness and exploration?
“There's a reason why renting has skyrocketed in the past couple of years; it's because for just $98 a month, you can try new pieces of clothing without having to settle on that style,” said Phoebe Goodwin, a recent Ole Miss graduate.
Renting will always be alluring, not only for its cost-effectiveness but also its ease. However, one-and-done fashion could be seen as an easy way out of searching for a personal style. When we are looking through an already curated closet, experimenting with fashion is almost impossible.
“Gen Z has a tendency to shop in a much more fractured way for apparel. Most older generations are very used to buying apparel and putting it in their closet and wearing it when they want. Gen Z is much more flexible…They like to have rapid changes of outfits. They don't like to necessarily be seen in the same thing every day or every occasion,” retail analyst Neil Saunders said to Forbes.
When it comes to personal style, how do we define it in the context of rental fashion? Yes, we pick our pieces for the month; the same pieces that thousands of girls are also picking and wearing that month. The reality is that because these operations have become mass markets, the brands that are featured on these renting websites are being monopolized. Therefore, when everyone is wearing the same brand, the same style, the same way; individuality suffers. People aren’t presented with the opportunity to search for a unique style outside of the mainstream.
There are more ways than one to have style and find looks that create space for individuality. Thrift shops, niche boutiques, Poshmark, and a curated eye for what you like are the best tools for creating a closet that is sustainable and unique to you. You have all you need to create your own individual style that can easily adapt and shift with your personal trends as you go throughout life, and that’s exciting!
Renting culture is shaping the fashion industry and the way we view creativity today. The question is: how will it affect you? Can there be a happy medium between finding an individual style and borrowing someone else’s?
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