The Women Who Don’t Own Clothes

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 o