Next to thinking long and hard before buying new clothes or swapping clothes, you can also rent your clothes:
Clothing libraries are an ideal remedy for mass consumption. Everyone loves a closet that’s regularly filled with new items, yet when sharing each other’s garments with the help of a clothing library, this becomes possible without having to actually buy new pieces.
Our northern and southern neighbors have already embraced the concept. In the Netherlands there’s the LENA Fashion Library which operates from Amsterdam. Their focus lies on vintage, up-and-coming designers and sustainable labels, but your ordinary bad buys are just as welcome. In Paris you can rent designer fashion in L’habibliotheque.
We didn’t have to wait much longer for the first Belgian clothing library either: Les ReBelles d’Anvers, the first Flemish clothing library, opened its doors in Spring 2016. They mainly offered Belgian fashion, both online and offline.
On online rental platforms you can order clothes just like in any webshop, except that you have to send them back after a certain time.
There are already plenty of examples of online rental platforms where you can rent designer clothing at a fair price: the American Rent The Runway is probably best known, Le Tote is another American platfom, but in England Girl Meets Dress offers a similar concept, while Australia has Rent My Rack. (Unfortunately you can’t order anything on these platforms from Belgium (yet).)
Keep in mind that, next to these online platforms, you can rent clothes from several brands too, like for instance Filippa K (Lease The Look).