Spending hundreds of dollars on a designer dress or luxury outfit is out of the budget for many Australians, but a trend has emerged across the country: to hire instead.

While suit hire has been around for decades, designer-dress hire businesses have become increasingly popular in recent years.

Newcastle woman Annabelle Scott is a self-proclaimed “dress-hire convert”.

She has hired more than 20 dresses since first discovering a local rental shop two years ago. 

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“Being in my early 30s … there’s been lots of engagement parties, weddings, then friends and myself sort of having babies, so there’s a few christenings or first birthday parties,” she said. 

Convenient, cost-effective 

Dress hire offers customers the chance to wear a designer garment for up to a tenth of its retail cost. 

For Ms Scott, it’s meant she’s been able to access dozens of “brighter and bolder” dresses she wouldn’t normally buy.

“They are dresses that I probably wouldn’t feel confident buying because I only want to wear them once or twice,” she said.

“So the price you have to pay per wear [when hiring], is a lot more cost effective.”

She has also enjoyed the convenience of hiring, as things like dry cleaning is organised by the rental. 

Business booming 

The first major dress hire businesses started in Australia about a decade ago.

While many of the larger companies exist only online, there is also a growing market for dress-hire boutiques.  

“I always wanted to be a physical shop, that was always my main point of difference,” said dress hire business owner Taya Calder-Dawson. 

Ms Calder-Dawson, who is based in Newcastle, opened her first hire shop in 2020 and the business has since grown to meet demand. 

“We went from two change rooms to four change rooms, one staff to four staff and 300 dresses to 800 dresses.

How it works 

Rental shops allow customers to browse their stock, find a dress in their size and if it’s available to rent for the date of their event, book it.

Most dress-hire businesses let people hire a garment for a four-day period; others offer longer. 

The shop takes care of shipping and dry cleaning before and after the dress is hired, so all the customer has to do is return it undamaged. 

Many rental shops offer consumers the ability to become “a lender”, which means people give the business their dress to rent on their behalf.

“They get commissions every month when someone rents it out.

How environmentally friendly is dress hire?

According to the Australian Fashion Council’s latest Clothing Data Report, more than 200,000 tonnes of clothing in Australia ended up in landfill in 2018-19. 

The report also found Australians are one of the world’s biggest fashion consumers, with roughly 1.4 billion units of new clothing created or imported here each year. 

That equates to 56 new items of clothing for each Australian per year.

Dress hiring boasts a model of circular fashion to tackle this fast fashion crisis, but there are still questions about just how environmentally friendly hiring really is.

Researchers from the Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion and Textiles have teamed up with one of the country’s largest dress-hire businesses, The Volte, to try to figure this out.

Ten items from The Volte’s catalogue will be analysed for sustainability metrics including what materials the garment is made from, what packaging is used to send it to customers, how far it travels for each rental and how many times it is laundered between hires.

Associate Professor Timo Rissanen said while the research was ongoing, there had been some promising findings already.

“In an individual wardrobe, these garments might get, if you’re lucky, five wears in the whole time that they’re owned by someone.

“That’s where the real sustainability benefits probably are.”

Dr Rissanen said every garment had carbon emissions attached to it, and the more it was worn, that figure went down.

A Zimmerman mini dress, rented 39 times, has saved the equivalent of 507 trees worth of carbon, using data from carbon footprint tracker Cogo.

“Where we’re consuming less garments per person, that’s where I think rental is an essential part of the solution,” Dr Rissanen said. 

“[It’s] not the only solution, and not the whole solution, but an essential part of the sort of range of solutions that we have.”