If you come into our shop this week you’ll notice something different on our clothing rack… a FOR RENT sign over a rack of coats that are NOT for sale. Instead of buying a coat you’ll never wear again, or braving Montréal's winter underdressed, you can now rent a quality, seasonally-appropriate, sustainably made-in-Montreal-by-BEDI coat for the length of your stay in our city.
I wanted to take some time to explain why I wanted to explore this particular aspect of the circular economy in the fashion space.
BUT FIRST… WHAT IT IS
Clothing rental is a simple idea: you borrow a garment for as long as you need it, then return it so someone else can wear it next. It might be a coat for a winter trip, a suit for a big interview or a one-off piece for an event you’ll never repeat. It can run through a shop, a library of shared wardrobes or a platform where neighbours lend to each other.
It’s part of the circular economy and a close cousin of repair and care. Rental only works when garments are well made, well looked after and mended between wearers when needed. It shifts the question from “what do I own?” to “what do I actually need to wear?”
Instead of buying a coat you’ll never wear again, or braving Montréal's winter underdressed, you can rent a quality, seasonally-appropriate, sustainably made-in-Montreal coat for the length of your stay in our city.
WHY IT MATTERS
For the planet. Most of a garment’s carbon footprint is created before anyone puts it on, so the number of times it’s worn matters enormously. A 2025 life cycle study of nine garments from an Australian peer-to-peer platform found that rented pieces produced lower greenhouse gas emissions per wear than owned ones, even with the extra washing and handling of repeated use. The gains were biggest for occasion wear: a rented wedding dress came in at about 1.7 kg of CO2-eq per wear, against 8.2 kg when owned. Researchers put the saving per wear at up to 78% for low-frequency garments.
Rental isn’t inherently sustainable, though. A 2021 Finnish study of a pair of jeans found that renting could produce more emissions than the alternatives, largely because of travel to and from the rental point. The same study found that low-carbon transport, or doubling the number of wears from 200 to 400, could flip the result. A Canadian study likewise found that dry-cleaned rental garments had higher life cycle emissions per piece. So the good version of rental depends on a few things: pieces worn many times, gentle cleaning, short trips and durable cloth that gets repaired, all key elements of our rental program at Point de Repère.
For people. Rental opens up the wardrobe. You can wear something necessary for an occasion without paying for it or storing it afterward. It frees up closet space, spares the guilt of the “worn once” outfit and lets people try styles they might not commit to buying. Borrowing and lending are old habits, and they create community by building trust, connection and a shared sense that clothes can travel from person to person.
At its heart, rental is a way of saying that a garment is worth more when it’s worn often, by many people, and looked after along the way.
Sources & further reading:
Above figures come from the University of Technology Sydney’s study with The Volte, which is peer-to-peer and Australian. Results vary a lot by garment, distance and cleaning method.
