Millions of freshly pressed cardboard boxes come weekly through mailboxes around the country. Inside these boxes are the latest “solution” to our fashion eco-scare: rented designer dresses, subscription casual wear, peer-to-peer exchange clothes. Fashion companies tell us about one seemingly amazing bargain they can provide us: unlimited diversity of clothing without any harm to the planet. However, there is no magic going on behind the facade of the “gifting economy.” The clothes are still coming from factories, they just get repackaged as “environmentally friendly.”
In theory, renting works like a miracle. Instead of owning just one dress to go to an event, you rent the one worn by hundreds of people and save unnecessary garbage. However, it fails because each of these clothing items requires a significant amount of carbon fuel spent on delivery and pick-up of the garments by the customers, as well as special care like air or ground transport, poly-mailer packaging and dry-cleaning. Renting an outfit several times creates a much bigger carbon footprint compared to buying a garment and wearing it until its last day because of huge energy consumption.
More importantly, rentals do not solve our psychological addiction to the “new.” Fast fashion works based on rapid trend cycles and the unofficial social media rule not to wear the same piece of clothing twice. Instead of addressing this unhealthy trend, rental platforms reinforce it by supporting such culture, confirming the perception that clothing is disposable content that needs to be featured on Instagram instead of being something useful for everyday life. With such systems, the addiction is shifted from one closet to the other, and nothing changes.
It is important to mention that renting special clothing items like tuxes, maternity wear or winter wear makes sense. The problem begins with the fact that people are encouraged to try renting weekly pieces of casual clothing. In doing so, we make the choice to favor temporary comfort instead of long-term use and continue to require huge amounts of clothing to be produced every day.
If sustainability is going to be achieved within fashion, better logistics will not pull us out of excessive consumption. There needs to be change in the form of consuming less and being humble enough to wear clothes that we already have until they are worn out.