The shopping centre company Westfield has conducted research into how successful the clothes rental market could be in the UK.
It asked UK shoppers whether they were interested in the idea of renting clothes rather than buying them, and found a surprisingly large proportion were open to the rather unusual idea.
20% of shoppers said they would consider renting their clothes, with this proportion rising 33% in London and 46% amongst people aged 25 to 34.
When asked how much they would be willing to pay to rent their clothes, 20% said they would be willing to pay £200 for a monthly unlimited subscription. This rose to 40% for Londoners and 59% for those Londoners who described themselves as being extremely confident fashion shoppers.
The openness of UK shoppers to clothes rental has been put down to the recent popularity of online “rental” subscriptions and the “sharing economy” with companies such as Netflix, Airbnb and Uber all seeing strong user numbers.
