At 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. I bought it at Zara last April, in a flush of springtime optimism. The dress is a hundred per cent cotton, midi length, and belted at the waist. It is also bright yellow, somewhere between ripe banana and free-range egg yolk.
In the dressing room, I thought that it made me look cheerful, like a modest yet sexy daffodil. At home, my unsparing mirror told the truth: I was Big Bird with pockets.
I have plenty of clothes that I love. Even so, the weeds are starting to choke the garden. According to Jennifer Hyman, the C. Inditex, the Spanish company that owns Zara, is the biggest clothing retailer in the world, and produces 1. Its business relies on both the fact of surplus and the impression of scarcity.
If you take a few days to mull over a possible purchase, it may well be gone by the time you return. 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.
The idea was simple. Men have long been able to rent tuxedos for black-tie events. Rent the Runway gave women access to designer dresses for a fraction of the sticker price. A few years ago, Hyman thought hard about how to expand the business. The company tried offering a subscription service for handbags and accessories, but it fell flat. At a focus group held in Washington, D. She was saying that Rent the Runway was a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. In , Hyman and Fleiss launched Rent the Runway Unlimited, a subscription service that initially aimed to help professional women dress for work, and has since expanded to cover most of their daily fashion concerns.
