Why should a woman spend a fortune on a gown that she’ll probably never wear again? Rent the Runway gave women access to designer dresses for a fraction of the sticker price. Men have long been able to rent tuxedos for black-tie events. Hyman founded Rent the Runway in 2008 with Jenny Fleiss, while both were in their second year at Harvard Business School. Prices are low enough to nudge customers to buy that bedazzled leopard-print cape to wear out on Saturday night, even if it ends up at Goodwill on Sunday morning. If you take a few days to mull over a possible purchase, it may well be gone by the time you return. Its business relies on both the fact of surplus and the impression of scarcity. Inditex, the Spanish company that owns Zara, is the biggest clothing retailer in the world, and produces 1.5 billion items a year. Each year, as Hyman is fond of pointing out, the average American buys sixty-eight items of clothing, eighty per cent of which are seldom worn twenty per cent of what the $2.4-trillion global fashion industry generates is thrown away.Ĭhief among the culprits here are fast-fashion businesses like Zara and H&M, which flood their stores with a constantly renewed selection of cheaply manufactured styles cribbed from high-end designers. “Every woman has the feeling of opening up her closet and seeing the dozens of dead dresses that she’s worn only once,” she told me recently. Even so, the weeds are starting to choke the garden.Īccording to Jennifer Hyman, the C.E.O. The return window closed long ago that’s seventy-nine dollars added to my open tab of sartorial bets made and lost, joining the expensive brocade palazzo pants I wore to a fancy function and then forgot about, and the mom jeans that I got on a trip to Stockholm, where they seemed safely on the hip side of hideous. At home, my unsparing mirror told the truth: I was Big Bird with pockets.
In the dressing room, I thought that it made me look cheerful, like a modest yet sexy daffodil. It is also bright yellow, somewhere between ripe banana and free-range egg yolk.
The dress is a hundred per cent cotton, midi length, and belted at the waist. I bought it at Zara last April, in a flush of springtime optimism. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Īt the back of my narrow New York City closet, squished between a thick sweater that has gone ignored since last winter and a long-retired pair of floral-print jeans, is a dress that I have never worn.
0 kommentar(er)
