Your closet is overflowing, yet you’ve been wearing the same outfits for months. This observation, shared by a large portion of French consumers, summarizes the paradox of current fashion: buy a lot, wear little, throw away quickly. Circular fashion offers a concrete alternative, and clothing rental is one of the most accessible levers. Instead of owning, you borrow, return, and refresh your wardrobe without producing additional waste.
Clothing Rental and the AGEC Law: What the Regulation Changes
Articles on circular fashion rarely mention the legal framework that structures this market. The AGEC law (anti-waste for a circular economy) and its implementing decrees for the textile sector have, however, changed the game since 2022.
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Specifically, rental, repair, and reuse services are now counted as prevention actions in the objectives of eco-organisms like Refashion. This means that renting a garment is no longer a marginal act: it is recognized by French regulation as a measurable contribution to reducing textile waste.
The Common Program for Circular Fashion, supported by the Federation of Circular Fashion and Refashion, makes rental a full-fledged performance indicator. This official recognition encourages brands to develop rental offers, including those that would never have considered this model five years ago. Platforms like https://hylla.fr/ contribute to this dynamic by facilitating access to clothing rental for a wide audience.
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Baby Wardrobe and Second-Hand Clothing: The Hybrid Rental-Resale Model
Have you noticed how quickly a child changes size? A bodysuit worn for three weeks ends up at the bottom of a drawer. It is on this observation that French brands are building a new model.
Kiabi announced in 2024 that it was testing a baby wardrobe rental system combined with a buyback and resale system through its Kiabi Seconde Main platform. The principle: you rent clothes for a few months, then the items return to a resale or recycling stream.
This hybrid “rental then resale” model changes the purely rental logic. The garment is never left unused: it moves from one household to another or joins a recycling stream. The brand controls the entire cycle, from availability to end-of-life processing.
Why This Model Works Better for Children’s Clothing
Baby and young children’s clothing has three characteristics that make rental particularly relevant:
- The usage duration is very short (a few weeks to a few months), making new purchases difficult to justify economically and ecologically.
- The items are often in good condition after use, as they are worn for a short time, which facilitates their re-circulation.
- Renewal is predictable and frequent, simplifying logistical management for rental platforms.
This segment serves as a natural entry point for consumers who would not have considered this practice for their own wardrobe.
Rebound Effects: When Renting Encourages More Consumption
Does clothing rental really reduce environmental impact? The answer depends on the behavior of each user. Research on the practices of consumers using rental services shows that rental can encourage increased clothing consumption among certain profiles.
The mechanism is simple to understand. Renting lowers the financial barrier: for a monthly subscription, you access a volume of items far greater than what you would buy. Some users take advantage of this to change outfits more often, order frequent deliveries, and return items after a single use.
Three Behaviors That Cancel Out Ecological Benefits
The repeated transport of parcels (sending, returning, cleaning, reshipping) generates emissions. Professional maintenance between each rental consumes water and energy. And simply wearing a garment once before returning it reproduces the disposable model, albeit in a different form.
The sustainability of the model relies on the actual number of uses per garment. If each rented piece replaces a new purchase and circulates among several users over a long period, the outcome is positive. If rental serves to fuel a frantic renewal pace, the environmental gain evaporates.
Circular Fashion Market in France: Figures and Perspectives
The FMC x Accenture study estimates the circular fashion market at €6.3 billion in 2023, with an estimated annual growth of 12% until 2030. This figure includes rental, but also reuse, repair, upcycling, and recycling.
Rental represents only a fraction of this market, but its growth is driven by several converging factors: regulatory pressure (AGEC law, textile REP sectors), changing consumer expectations, and the entry of mainstream brands into the segment.
What Still Hinders Massive Adoption
The main obstacle remains logistics. Collecting, cleaning, storing, and redistributing rented clothing requires an infrastructure that few players master on a large scale. The cost of maintenance between two rentals weighs on profitability. And the perceived hygiene issue deters some consumers, even though professional cleaning standards are often more rigorous than domestic washing.
The other barrier concerns the duration of commitment. Monthly subscriptions are appealing, but the churn rate remains high after a few months of use. Retaining a user over the long term requires renewing the catalog, offering quality items, and ensuring a smooth experience with each exchange.
Circular fashion is not just an isolated gesture. Renting a garment makes sense when this rental is part of an overall reduction in purchased volume. The French regulatory framework pushes in this direction, brands are beginning to structure their offers, and consumers have concrete tools to change their habits. The real test for each user remains to ensure that rental replaces a purchase, not that it adds to it.