Please Ask Me How I'm Feeling About The Demise Of Rent the Runway Unlimited
How can they do this to me?
I was planning to write about something totally different this week, but then yesterday, in the midst of what felt like five other minor crises in my life, I got an email with the subject line: “An update on Unlimited Swap membership.” Except it wasn’t an update, and I really wish corporate copywriters would stop using this misleadingly neutral kind of language. What it is is a cancellation. A death, really. Yes, Rent the Runway is getting rid of its Unlimited service at the end of this year and replacing it with… something that will appeal more to non-millennial women in the middle of the country? (This isn’t me projecting, that’s really what they said in this article. Won’t someone please think of the “fashion-forward, coastal millennials!”) They haven’t announced what the full range of new plan and pricing options are yet, but to me and, based on some very informal Twitter scrolling, many others, it sounds like more money for less clothes — they say, for example, that you’ll be able to choose to get 4, 8, or 16 items a month, and that the 8-item plan will cost $135, which is about as much as the Unlimited plan does now. (For the unindoctrinated, a basic Unlimited plan gives you four items at a time, but you can return them and get new things as many times as you want. It costs $139 a month.)
According to RTR, only 6% of Unlimited members cycled through 16 items a month or more, and they seem to want us to believe that for the majority of users, this new thing will actually be cheaper. Not to out myself as a complete freak — although, fuck it, I am what I am — but before the pandemic, I could easily go through 25 items a month. I was hyper-vigilant about keeping a constant rotation of pieces; part of my lunchtime routine was dropping items off at an RTR drop box inside a WeWork near my office. I’d pick out items for my new shipment while eating whatever sad salad or poke bowl I was dining on that afternoon, and the new clothes would usually be at my office by the next morning. These days, I’ve been rotating much less, but I’d still estimate that I’m cycling through at least 14 items per month. This is partially possible because I live in New York City, where there are plenty of drop boxes, the flagship store, and a nearby warehouse, meaning even now, my returns are often processed less than 24 hours from when I mail them (RTR used to use UPS, they recently switched to FedEx, which now seems like a harbinger of these changes). I understand, from a business standpoint, why Unlimited is untenable for RTR right now. I have no idea how many people dropped the service once the pandemic hit, but I imagine it was a lot. I was given some hope that Unlimited could survive earlier this year when I interviewed other women who were still using it, but then, the whole point of the story was that it was notable that we were all still dropping $139/month for fancy WFH garb.
What I’m saying is, I have feared this day for a long, long time. As an OG user of Unlimited — I started when it was just accessories, I was there when it cost something insane like just $50/month for three slots, and in fact, the only times I haven’t had it since it launched are when I’ve been unemployed, and renewing it was always the first thing I did when I found full-time work again — to me, even at its current price, it always felt like something that was too good to be true. Like, I can just have as many clothes as I want? For this relatively affordable monthly fee? It appeals to the sartorial glutton in me. It’s also, when you use it as actively as I do, sort of a hobby. I love scrolling through the app, making lists for different seasons and events, envisioning the perfect occasion for a pale pink Cecilie Bahnsen puff dress (my socially distanced birthday hang in the park this year) or a rainbow faux fur Osman coat (every day of the winter last year). It’s helped me stop feeling the need to hoard clothes just to feel like I have options. It’s also made me feel less panicked about gaining weight, because I know that even if some items in my closet don’t fit right now, I can always easily obtain ones that do.
But more than anything, Unlimited has always been a symbol of access. It has allowed me to wear designers I could only otherwise dream about, which has meant feeling comfortable in situations I might otherwise feel intimidated by. If you’re not into fashion, or don’t have a career that routinely thrusts you into the presence of the super-rich and preternaturally stylish, this may be hard to understand. But when I first discovered Rent the Runway, back when they only rented piecemeal, I was a young reporter at an arts and culture website, and to my party girl delight, a big part of the job was flitting around town to report on various galas and openings. I loved it, but I also felt so self-conscious all the time, terrified I would show up in the Zara knockoff of some trendy piece only to wind up standing next to a woman in the real thing. Discovering that, for $60 or so a pop, I could get my broke 25-year-old hands on a silky grey Helmut Lang gown or a structured David Koma party dress for a night was a revelation. The subsequent invention of Unlimited was a balm for almost every insecurity I’ve ever felt about getting dressed. It was a promise that I’d always have access to at least some of the designer goods I covet; a ticket to looking the part, whatever that part may be.
I guess, theoretically, all of this will still be available to me via the new plan, though I can’t shake the feeling that it’s the die-hard, obsessive users like me — the ones who tell all our friends about it and tag all our outfits on Instagram — who are getting screwed here. I’m worried this new plan will make it harder to get the pieces you really want, since you’ll have to order everything all at once, and often the best, most high-end pieces only show up once in a while. (I’ve been known to keep a single slot open and log on at weird times like 7am or midnight when I’m hunting a certain item.) The other thing I’m worried about is that it sounds like there’s really no way to easily send back items that don’t fit. Thus far, the company has been unclear about how this will work, saying on Twitter that people will get two free exchanges a month. I’ve recently put a moratorium on buying clothes that are final sale — my weight has fluctuated over the past couple years, and it sucks to have a piece of clothing hanging around that once symbolized beauty and promise and now functions as a reminder of body insecurities — so I can’t really envision myself tolerating a policy like that. But I also can’t imagine my life without RTR.
Even just the name: Unlimited. Isn’t that how we all want to feel? Unlimited in choices, ambition, whatever. In terms of aspirational branding, Unlimited is our era’s answer to Forever 21, another thing that recently met something of a grave end. I’m not sure what they’ll be calling this new program, but I can’t imagine it having the same appeal as one that touts an end to those pesky limits always dominating our lives. Maybe something with the word “swap”? A reminder that everything in life is a trade-off. Which, I must say, does feel more apt for the world we exist in today.
You may be wondering, do you really need 25 things cycling through your closet every month? And the answer is, no, I most certainly do not. And it’s probably good to acknowledge and internalize that. In their press release, RTR mentions carbon emissions and the wastefulness of all these shipments forever criss-crossing the country. It’s certainly something I’ve thought about before, as is the treatment of those working in their drycleaning and shipping centers. After I published the aforementioned story about women still using it during the pandemic, another site published one that focused on how the company may have been skirting laws and endangering workers’ lives to keep operating in the pandemic. I felt, and still feel, awful for not considering that aspect of it in my story.
I’m not sure you can call the late 2010s a moment of excess — not in the same overblown way the ‘80s or early aughts were — but the decade we are entering now seems almost certain to be one of more austerity and less frivolity. As it should be. And the end of Unlimited, to me, symbolizes the end of an era of overindulgence both in the world and in my personal life. For people my age, it’s like one day in March our silly young adulthood just ended abruptly. We were told to leave our offices, abandon our travel plans, cancel those dinner reservations. We were told that it wasn’t safe, so we went home and became different people, because what else was there to do? People moved to the suburbs, had kids, started saving more money. They got serious about things, because things got serious. Whenever this is over, whatever that means, we’ll emerge from it different people. Stronger and more mature, sure, but also hardened. Less fun. And there’s nothing to do but embrace it, but part of me will always be missing a time when it didn’t feel so wrong to desire limitlessness, when I didn’t feel the need to call that into question so much. Those few brief years when I had access to unlimited party dresses on the internet.