Clothing rental has spent years accumulating goodwill as a credible alternative to conventional fashion consumption. The proposition is coherent: fewer garments purchased outright, longer product life cycles, and access to wardrobes that would otherwise require significant capital outlay. Circular fashion advocates have framed rental as one of the more practical routes toward reducing an industry responsible for roughly 10% of global carbon emissions. Yet the market has not scaled at the pace its environmental logic might suggest. The reason, research increasingly indicates, has less to do with ideology and more to do with something considerably more mundane: whether consumers believe a rented garment will arrive smelling clean, looking unworn, and worth paying for without the permanence of ownership.
A study published by BI Norwegian Business School, based on surveys of more than 4,000 women across Norway and Germany and a series of in-depth focus groups, examined what drives and what obstructs clothing rental adoption. Its findings complicate the dominant narrative around sustainable fashion. Social stigma, which earlier research had flagged as a meaningful deterrent, did not emerge as a significant barrier. Consumers did not report heightened embarrassment or reputational risk associated with renting clothes. What they reported instead were concerns of a more tactile and transactional nature: garments that might carry odours from previous wearers, fabrics visibly degraded by repeated use, and services that made it difficult to assess fit, style, or quality before committing.
Those concerns ranked among the strongest barriers across both national markets surveyed. Between 76 and 80% of respondents identified odour-free garments as a prerequisite for rental consideration, and between 74 and 78% cited mint condition as equally non-negotiable. These figures sat substantially higher than the share who pointed to environmental credentials as a primary motivator, even though a clear majority across both countries acknowledged that sustainability mattered to them in principle.
That gap between stated environmental concern and actual decision-making calculus is the central tension the research exposes. Consumers in both Norway and Germany expressed broadly positive attitudes toward the idea that clothing rental ought to be environmentally friendly. Between 62 and 64% agreed with that position. But when ranked against immediate concerns about product condition, service reliability, and ease of use, sustainability fell away as a lever. It reinforced decisions already being made on other grounds rather than initiating them.
Clothing occupies a category of consumption unlike most others implicated in sustainability debates. Garments are worn against the body, judged by others at close range, and bound up in self-presentation in ways that shared transport or accommodation are not. That intimacy raises the threshold for trust considerably. A consumer willing to accept minor uncertainty when booking a rental car or an apartment faces a materially different calculation when the question is whether a dress or jacket will arrive fit to wear. Doubts about cleanliness, fit, or visible wear carry personal exposure in a way that other shared-asset categories largely avoid.
The structural consequence is significant for platforms operating in this space. Rental services that have built their marketing around ethical positioning may find themselves addressing a finite audience. Mainstream adoption requires meeting the commercial reliability that conventional retail has long since normalised.
