Two stories about clothes landed this week and they could not be more philosophically opposed. The Atlantic reports that Nuuly, the rental clothing platform, is quietly colonizing American closets. The pitch is sustainability-adjacent, budget-adjacent, and deeply anti-ownership. Meanwhile, Highsnobiety profiled Babaà, the Spanish slow-knitwear label that makes sweaters using only local artisans, deliberately, expensively, and with the explicit intention that the garment outlasts a decade. These two stories are not trends. They are arguments.
Rental Culture and the End of the Wardrobe as Self
The Nuuly model is structurally similar to what streaming did to music libraries. You access, you return, you never accumulate. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Gülden Ülkümen and Carey Morewedge found that ownership significantly increases perceived utility and emotional attachment to objects. Rental removes both. The wardrobe, which has historically been one of the most intimate archives of personal history, becomes a feed: personalized, optimized, and ultimately owned by the platform. The clothes pass through you. You do not pass through the clothes.
Slow Knit as Counter-Protocol
Babaà's insistence on artisan production and sweaters designed to last is, in this context, less a fashion statement than a refusal. It rhymes structurally with what Nicolas Cevallos wrote about iPods as modern heirlooms: the argument that buying forever is itself an act of resistance in an age of disposable consumption. The Skechers Y2K re-release and the Converse POINTEDTOE drop happening in the same week are nostalgic objects doing the opposite work: they borrow emotional weight from permanence while functioning as fast fashion speed-runs. The rental economy and the re-release economy are, it turns out, two faces of the same extraction: one rents you the feeling, the other sells you the memory.