The Ralph Lauren fashion house is getting in on one of the major fashion trends of recent times: it is opening a service for renting its own clothes. In 2020, the idea of renting clothes instead of buying them has become unusually popular. It is associated with the pandemic, when people began to save money in the purse and space in the apartment, as well as with the general movement on environmental friendliness and reasonable consumption in fashion.
American fashion house Ralph Lauren opened a clothing rental service, The New York Times reported. At The Lauren Look, subscribers will be able to borrow clothes from the brand’s most democratic line, Lauren Ralph Lauren.
In order to borrow the closet items the service offers, you must subscribe to it – a membership costs from $125 per month. The service’s website will feature about 600 items for women of different sizes – casual, evening and even homemade.
Subscribers to the service will be able to choose 10 items in a virtual closet once a month, marking the ones they like best – and receive four of them a few days later. After wearing the clothes and returning them, he will be able to choose his closet items again. And if he wants to buy something, he’ll get a discount of a third of the price.
“The Lauren Look allows us to explore a whole new model by tapping into the growing trend toward the sharing economy and revolutionizing our position in the fashion consumption system,” David Lauren, son of brand founder Ralph Lauren and responsible for innovation and brand management at the company, told The New York Post.
The first clothing rental company appeared in the U.S. back in 2009 – the pioneers of this segment were Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss, who created Rent the Runway. They came up with the idea of offering consumers designer looks that can be borrowed for four to eight days for the price of 10% of the full cost of a piece of clothing. By 2016, the service had 6 million female customers – the company had 975 employees and 400 designers as partners. Now Rent the Runway has not only a website, but also “live” showrooms where you can try on clothes in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
The idea proved so popular that over time other companies began to appear in the U.S., offering to compose a closet of things borrowed – in particular, Nuuly and Le Tote. However, as a rule, such services offered only outfits for special occasions – the kind that are worn once in a lifetime.
However, the real boom in clothing rentals occurred in 2020 – in September, the growth of this market was noted in The Guardian. The publication cited the example of a service called By Rotation, launched in October 2019 – its founder Yeshita Cabra-Davis offered clients to rent clothes of iconic brands, popularized by Internet Influencers.
From March to September of last year, the number of users who downloaded her app grew from 12,000 to 25,000, and the number of items for rent increased by 120%. Sasha Newal, co-founder of Britain’s first clothing rental app, told the newspaper that the number of brands and private rentals partnering with the app has increased 50% since the company’s founding year (2018).
Large companies in the UK have also taken a closer look at the clothing rental system: in the summer, retailer Selfridges launched its Project Earth initiative, which included the company’s own rental service.
rocats work in different ways. For example, By Rotation’s clients communicate directly with rental companies or individuals, while My Wardrobe HQ buys clothes from independent sellers or buys unsold clothes from brands at stockists, and deals with cleaning and courier delivery. The other companies – OnLoan, Endless Wardrobe, Devout, Rotaro – work according to the same system as the new Ralph Lauren service, providing a certain amount of clothing for a fixed fee per month.
Owners of clothing rentals in the U.K. attributed the popularity of the idea to the impact of the pandemic. “Rentals are growing because people are really worried about their wallet, but they still want to wear something new and cute without financial risk,” Sasha Newal told The Guardian. Yeshita Cabra-Davis, meanwhile, suggested that during the lockdown, people noticed how small apartments they lived in and how much excess there was – and renting things instead of buying them seemed like a sensible idea.
At the very end of last year, renting things was named one of the top fashion trends of 2021 by British magazine Grazia – according to its data, by December 2020 it turned out that By Rotation’s number of orders since November increased by 600% and Rotaro’s – by 200%.
The publication attributed this sharp increase to Christmas, for which the British decided to dress up in clothes rented. And if the owners of the rental services themselves see the reason for their popularity in pragmatism and the desire to save money, the fashion observers are confident: with the growing trend for environmental friendliness and rational consumption rental clothing becomes the most logical choice.