Circular Fashion: Resale, Rental, Repair — What Actually Works?
Jenny Daphne Pitsillides – Editor | Re:Fabricate — Real Solutions for a Better Fashion Industry
A jumper changes hands in a café in Hackney. No label, no receipt, no ceremony. Just a quiet transaction between two people who never met before and probably won’t again. The jumper has already lived one life. This is its second. It may not be its last.
Circular fashion tends to arrive wrapped in diagrams: arrows looping neatly back on themselves, waste transformed into value, consumption recoded as care. In practice, it’s messier. Human. Dependent on logistics, labour, taste, timing, and whether someone can be bothered to list a dress properly on a Sunday night.
Over the past decade, resale platforms, rental wardrobes, and repair schemes have become the industry’s preferred proof that fashion can be something other than extractive. Some of these models have scaled with startling speed. Others have stalled, quietly or spectacularly. The difference isn’t ideology. It’s behaviour, margin, friction.
This is the terrain on which the next set of circular fashion conversations will sit.
The garment after the moment
Most clothes don’t fail because they fall apart. They fail because they fall out of favour. Trend fatigue, body shifts, algorithmic boredom. Circular models intervene at this point of abandonment, but in very different ways.
Resale leans into desire’s return. Rental suspends ownership altogether. Repair asks for patience, skill, and a relationship with what you already have. All three promise longevity. Only some deliver it at scale.
Resale: where liquidity meets habit
Resale works best when it behaves less like virtue and more like infrastructure.
Platforms such as Depop and Vinted didn’t grow because users wanted to “shop sustainably”. They grew because the platforms were intuitive, social, and, crucially, liquid. Items move quickly. Prices are flexible. Sellers are often buyers too.
The success of peer-to-peer resale rests on a few unglamorous truths:
- Low overheads: no warehouses, no authentication bottlenecks (at least initially).
- Distributed labour: users photograph, price, describe, and ship their own items.
- Cultural fluency: resale is embedded in youth culture, streetwear, archive fashion, and nostalgia cycles.
In parallel, managed resale platforms such as Vestiaire Collective and The RealReal professionalised trust: authentication, logistics, luxury pricing. They also absorbed the cost. Margins tightened. Layoffs followed. The lesson was blunt: resale can scale, but only when friction is ruthlessly reduced, or convincingly justified.
Brand-led resale sits somewhere in between. Patagonia’s Worn Wear programme, often cited as a gold standard, works because it aligns with an existing repair culture and product durability. Not every brand has that inheritance. Not every customer wants their loyalty rewarded with store credit and a complex returns process.
Resale thrives when it feels less like a moral decision and more like second nature.
Rental: the fantasy of access
Rental promised something intoxicating: endless novelty without accumulation. A rotating wardrobe. A lighter footprint. For a moment, it looked like the future.
The reality has been heavier.
Fashion rental platforms, including UK-based HURR, operate at the intersection of aspiration and logistics. Cleaning, quality control, shipping, insurance, customer service, all recurring costs. Unlike resale, garments don’t leave the system. They circulate until they degrade.
Rental works best in narrow contexts: occasionwear, maternity, high-ticket statement pieces. It struggles with everyday fashion, where wear-and-tear accelerates depreciation faster than subscription fees can recover value.
There’s also a behavioural contradiction. Rental relies on users wanting variety, but circular logic depends on slowing desire. The tension isn’t fatal, but it is structural.
Some rental platforms have adapted by hybridising: rental plus resale, peer-to-peer listings, brand partnerships. Others have quietly downsized. The fantasy remains compelling. The unit economics are unforgiving.
Repair and recommerce: intimacy at scale
Repair is the most romantic circular model, and the hardest to industrialise.
A mended seam carries memory. Time. Touch. Repair asks users to value continuity over replacement, and brands to invest in labour that doesn’t easily scale. It also exposes uncomfortable truths about garment quality. Clothes designed for speed are rarely designed for return.
Recommerce schemes, buy-back, refurbishment, resale, attempt to bridge this gap. They formalise repair, centralise it, make it legible to balance sheets. The trade-off is intimacy. Repair becomes a service rather than a relationship.
Still, where recommerce works, it tends to be anchored in product categories with inherent durability: denim, outerwear, workwear. It also benefits from physical presence, stores, workshops, visible mending. Digital-only repair rarely resonates in the same way.
Repair doesn’t fail because people don’t care. It falters because care takes time, and time costs money.
Why some systems stretch — and others stall
Across resale, rental, and repair, patterns repeat.
What scales:
- Models that externalise labour without alienating users
- Platforms that reduce decision fatigue
- Systems aligned with existing habits, not aspirational ones
- Categories with inherent durability or cultural longevity
What struggles:
- High-touch logistics without high margins
- Behaviour change framed as lifestyle overhaul
- Garments designed without second lives in mind
- Circularity retrofitted onto linear supply chains
Circular fashion succeeds when it accommodates reality rather than resisting it.
The circular ceiling
There is a limit to how circular fashion can be within an industry still producing at scale. Resale cannot absorb infinite newness. Rental cannot offset overproduction. Repair cannot rescue garments never meant to last.
This isn’t a failure of imagination. It’s a structural constraint.
Circular models function best as pressure valves, extending garment lifespans, redistributing value, slowing some flows, rather than total solutions. Their effectiveness depends as much on what happens upstream as on their own design.
What the interviews will have to reckon with
As platforms like Depop, Vinted, and HURR continue to evolve, the questions sharpen.
How do you scale without erasing the behaviours that made you work?
Where does responsibility sit, with the platform, the brand, the user?
And what does success look like when circularity meets financial reality?
The jumper in the café will keep circulating regardless. The industry’s task is to decide whether it’s willing to build systems that honour that quiet continuity, or merely borrow its language.
The loop, it turns out, is not infinite. It is negotiated.
References
Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future. Available at: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org (Accessed: 17 November 2025).
Bain & Company (2022) Luxury Resale and Circularity Report. Available at: https://www.bain.com (Accessed: 17 November 2025).
McKinsey & Company (2023) The State of Fashion: Circularity and Resale. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com (Accessed: 17 November 2025).
ThredUp (2024) Resale Report. Available at: https://www.thredup.com/resale (Accessed: 17 November 2025).