The Future of Fashion Is a Wardrobe That Always Turns

Every ’90s kid even with a passing interest in fashion remembers where they were when Cher’s digital wardrobe came in Don’t know anything made a cameo on the screen. Like the flyboard for the Nordstrom Brass Plum set, this leap in technology instills feverish dreams in all of us—of a constantly rotating and traceable wardrobe, something that a number of ill-fated apps are trying to emulate.

While we may not all have our own closet in the cloud these days, Don’t know anything generations have adapted to a hybrid of rental, resale, and fast fashion. Call it a makeover: An aspiring Cher Horowitz might buy a bag she likes from a site like Rebag, get bored, trade it for credit, and lather, rinse, repeat. All variations of the ever-expanding selection of carousels; reduce potential waste and costs. Project manager Max Weinstein, 25, shopped at The RealReal and Heroine used this method, looking for pieces around the mid-2000s and early 2010s. He saw it as “cross-pollination”; for example, he recently resold a 2007 Lanvin treasure from Heroine to downtown New York vintage emporium James Veloria.

The popularity of clothing rental services, and interesting content on Instagram, has helped our brains to always innovate. “I really realized it from a social media perspective,” Weinstein said. “If you wear this [item] again, great, but you probably wouldn’t post more than two different outfits with this pair of pants.”

Smart retailers have followed suit. The Infinity Rebag program allows shoppers to keep the bag for up to one year and then hand it over for 70 to 80 percent of the original price in credit. (Infinity’s repurchases have tripled in the year following its 2019 launch, suggesting many of its customers are involved in an overhaul.) This summer, Clair Trade debuted, allowing buyers to buy and sell in a single transaction. Farfetch, whose second-hand sales skyrocketed from 2019 to 2020, launched Second Life in the US in November, allowing customers to exchange their high-end bags for site credit to shop from new collections. And The RealReal found that shippers are increasingly choosing credit over cash: This commission method grew 52 percent between June 2020 and June 2021. Oftentimes, people are buying from the same label they are selling. (Gucci, Prada, and Rag & Bone appear in the top five most shipped and most purchased brands this year.) The only thing that technology hasn’t mastered yet? Cher replacement switches are intended to prevent potential “mismatches”. There’s still some analog stuff that’s best left out.

This article appears in the September 2021 issue of ELLE.

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