You can spot the packages at most any UPS Store in any city. Sometimes they’re left in their own designated corner, dark gray amid a sea of brown cardboard. They have sprouted up in mail rooms, sorority houses, and even my own four-girl apartment. On their side reads a word that meant nothing 10 years ago—Nuuly.
“When I’m returning my Nuuly bag, at least one other girl in the UPS line also has a Nuuly bag, and then I look into the back room and there’s a whole pile of them,” Sarah Lewis, a 25-year-old working in advertising in New York City, told me. She said that on the one hand, it felt like being a member of a secret sisterhood, and on the other, it was a bit odd that “some girl in my building has probably worn the skirt I rented last week.”
Nuuly, which was founded in 2019, is just one of the many clothing-rental services encouraging young women to opt out of actually buying clothes and instead subscribe to a revolving closet. BNTO, Rent the Runway, and Fashion Pass all offer similar plans for similar prices, but Nuuly, with 477,000 active monthly subscribers, is by far the largest. For $98 a month, customers get to rent any six clothing items on the Nuuly app. The items arrive in a matter of days. There is no fee if you stain or damage something, and no fee for sending your clothes back late. If a customer can’t bring themselves to let go of a certain item, they can purchase it at a discounted rate.
Nuuly is owned by URBN, the fashion behemoth that includes Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters. It was born into the sharing economy. Uber and Airbnb had taken off, and people had proved themselves willing to ride in strangers’ cars and stay in their homes. But would women really be comfortable wearing other people’s clothing? Apparently, yes, especially as Instagram’s popularity was peaking and no one wanted to be caught online wearing the same outfit twice. Nuuly observed “this need for constant newness,” Kim Gallagher, the company’s executive director of marketing and customer success, told me. Suddenly, it was a new world for the young shopaholic.
That was seven years ago. I’ve been subscribing almost since the beginning, and I recently did the math: I’ve spent about $8,000 on Nuuly. Maybe $10,000 on clothing rentals overall if I count other services such as Rent the Runway. And what do I have to show for it, besides a decent Instagram grid? Maybe I’ve fooled a few folks into thinking I can afford the clothing I wear, but when I came home from returning my latest box and stood in front of my micro closet, I saw only the bare basics and the skeletons of a few trends I regret ever partaking in. This was my wardrobe?
People in their 20s and 30s are switching jobs often; they’re less religious than past generations; they can’t afford to own their homes; they’re even opting out of romantic relationships. In all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons, members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations seem to be shrinking from long-term commitments. The impulse is affecting the most significant areas of our lives—jobs and marriages and children—but it’s also transforming some of the most pedestrian. You used to be able to know a lot about a person from the records, cassette tapes, or CDs they collected. Now people can just sign up for Spotify and listen to everything without owning anything. They can rent all of their movies on Amazon Prime. And just look in our closets.
[Amanda Mull: The only thing you can’t subscribe to now is stability]
“I sent my Nuuly out this week,” Laura Taylor, a 29-year-old who works in education programming in Atlanta and has rented from Nuuly since 2019, told me. “I literally was standing in my closet thinking, I have nothing.”
Clothing is an identity marker. What we wear shows people who we are. Renting clothes can help people who can’t afford to buy new outfits every month home in on the style they want to have. But the eternal renter faces a paradox: If she replaces her permanent wardrobe with a revolving series of blouses and trousers, is the sampling in her closet on a given month even her wardrobe anymore? Consider it the shopaholic’s ship of Theseus. To really be ourselves, maybe we have to give up on always being someone new.
Gallagher told me that Nuuly grew out of a moment when customers’ desires for newness collided with their rising concerns about shopping’s environmental impact. The latter is central to Nuuly’s marketing campaigns: “Sustainable fashion from head to tote.” But it seems to be false—in two ways.
A 2021 study published in Environmental Research Letters compared five scenarios for a pair of jeans: someone buying and eventually tossing the jeans; wearing them for a really long time (called “extended use”); reselling them, perhaps to a thrift store; recycling the jeans into new items; and renting them out to multiple people through a service such as Nuuly. The study found that the rental-service option actually produced the most emissions and thus had the highest climate-change potential, for one obvious reason. Typical clothing delivery is one-way, and rental companies double the trip. Getting nearly 500,000 packages to subscribers every month makes a nasty carbon footprint. A separate study found that people who rented clothing didn’t necessarily reduce their clothing consumption overall.
The fact that customers don’t have to pay for damaging the clothes probably leads to yet more waste. “With Nuuly, there’s no real appreciation for the garment, so there’s no wherewithal to take care of it and intend for it to live a long life,” Sheridan Mark, a production specialist in the fashion industry, told me. People are much more careful with items that they own and hope to keep for years. Nuuly is “less curatorial and more disposable,” Mark said.
When I asked Gallagher about the lifespan of the average Nuuly item, she told me it was difficult to nail down, but that Nuuly goes to great lengths to salvage damaged clothes. “Our goal from when we’ve launched has been more life in your clothes. So we are always trying to extend the life of the clothes that are in our ecosystem,” she said “It’s obviously better from an environmental-impact standpoint, but it’s also better from a business standpoint. The longer we can keep things in circulation, the better.” She said the company had performed 2.7 million repairs and stain removals so far this fiscal year.
Customers themselves don’t seem to care about any of this. When I polled 30 women who rent their clothes, only two said that sustainability was their main reason. Twenty told me that it’s a nice bonus but not a driving factor. And eight said they were completely indifferent.
What do they care about?
Those on a tight budget can borrow six items for the same amount they might have spent on one nice shirt. “I couldn’t afford my personal style without Nuuly,” Megan Murphy, a 29-year-old woman working in politics in Washington, D.C., told me. Murphy tried Rent the Runway and Fashion Pass, but she’s been a Nuuly loyalist for five years. Like most of the women I spoke with, she told me that she started renting soon after college, when she landed her first big-girl job and needed to dress accordingly, but didn’t have the income to do so.
Murphy is now nine months pregnant, and she said that Nuuly has freed her not to worry about her changing body. “I haven’t had to try to squeeze into clothes or feel like I’ve had nothing to wear,” she said. “I was able to go to a black-tie wedding without even thinking about it.”
Everyone mentions wedding season. The majority of Nuuly’s customers are 25 to 35. “There’s nothing like the time where you’re going to weddings many weekends; you’re going to bachelorette parties; you’re dating; you’re going to bridal showers,” Gallagher said. The only downside is that everyone seems to be wearing one of the same 15 dresses to every wedding.
“There’s one specific wedding dress that’s green and blue, long sleeves, that I’ve seen on like 50,000 people,” Taylor told me. But she doesn’t mind whether whatever she’s wearing gets recognized. “I love to say, Oh, thanks—it’s Nuuly. And then everyone’s like, Oh my God—I love Nuuly! And then you start the conversation from that.” She doesn’t feel as if there’s a stigma around renting instead of owning. “I feel like everyone is using some type of service now,” she said. “It’s like the sisterhood of the traveling dress. I think it’s so sweet.”
[Daniel Indiviglio: Netflix for clothes]
No one told me that they regretted how much they’d spent renting clothes. “My body changes so much. I think in some capacity Nuuly has saved me,” Taylor said. She mentioned a $150 pair of jeans she bought a couple of years ago that no longer fits. “That makes me more sick than what I spend on Nuuly.” She likes that she gets to wear something that feels good for a month, and that someone else will go on to enjoy it. She never has to live with buyer’s remorse.
Despite all of this convenience, we are missing out on something. If you type Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy into the Nuuly search engine, 61 chic styles pop up. A few months ago, when the show Love Story, about the romance between Bessette-Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr., was released, seemingly every girl in America was attempting to recreate her clean “quiet luxury” look—a mix of sleek black turtlenecks and tailored beige jackets. Nuuly posted a Plan a ’90s day in NYC mood board on Instagram, with links to rentable looks. But Bessette-Kennedy, the original queen of the capsule wardrobe, famously repeated outfits. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy would never have used Nuuly, I thought.
Most people want to have pieces that feel important to them, that make them feel good not because they’re on trend, but because they’re meaningful. They want to have a personal style. Heather Hurst, a popular New York–based stylist and writer, sees clothing-rental services as a useful step toward that goal. “I think approaching it from that mentality of I’m going to use this to study what I would like to invest in is a little bit more productive than just renting for all of eternity,” she told me. “If we think of style kind of as a muscle, you’re not really strengthening it” if you’re always rotating out the pieces in your closet, and not building on what you already own, she said. The key is knowing when to quit the subscription and invest in clothes that you want to keep for a long time.
Hurst doesn’t blame young women for getting locked in the subscription cycle at a time when little in the world feels stable or secure. They can’t afford a house; their future spouse is nowhere to be seen. But we’re just talking about a trench coat here. It’s a classic piece, suitable for many seasons, whether you have a face full of natural collagen or a head of graying hair. Maybe it’s time to save up and commit to one.
When I picture the people I love, I usually envision each one in a signature outfit. I think of my namesakes, who both died years ago, in their trademark looks: Annie in her black-and-gold beaded caftan from Sierra Leone, always entirely too beautiful for anywhere we were going, and Joy in her embroidered emerald tunic and matching pants, never without a flashy clip-on earring. I’m not even 30 yet, and I need another outfit for another wedding, and I like those low-rise micro shorts that I know can’t possibly age well. But I don’t want my future grandchildren to remember me in a series of rented Anthropologie tops—always on trend, but never actually mine.