Rent the Runway

The other day a coworker told me about this great website, Rent the Runway where her friends rented their dresses to wear to a black tie wedding they attended. I had heard of the concept of renting fashion online before but decided to look more into it. Well, I discovered that it. is. so. cool.

The basic premise is that the website rents out designer dresses for a tenth of their purchase price. Chances are, if you're wearing a fancy gown you won't be wearing it more than once so this is a fantastic opportunity to wear something special to a formal event. How it works is you select the dress you want, get to choose 2 sizes that they will send to you during your rental period (just in case you're not sure which size you are) and then they also send a prepaid mailer for you to mail the dress back after your event! They pay for the dry cleaning and even have accessories that you can rent as well. It's like Netflix for fashion! The website is so great because previous renters leave reviews and can upload pictures of themselves in the dress along with their height and sizing information. It really helps determine if a dress will look good on you if you can see real women in all different sizes in the dress! Honestly, this is such a great concept and business!

After scoping out the website for a few minutes, I thought that this would be a perfect solution for bridesmaids! Let's get real here, the majority of bridesmaids are never going to wear their dress again. So why not rent it for a fraction of the cost? Your bridesmaids will love you for this! (If my bridesmaids are reading this, sorry gals, didn't know about this at the time I was picking out dresses. Also, spoiler alert- they don't have much in my color purple!)

The website has hundreds of different dresses, and many of them can work as traditional bridesmaid dresses.
They carry serious designers: Badgley Mischka, Diane Von Furstenburg, Kate Spade, Vera Wang, Reem Acra, etc. so your bridesmaids can wear something really special!

They have so many amazing dresses! I seriously saved so many more but in order to keep this post brief (ish) I have narrowed it down! All of these dresses are rentable for less than $200 and most are under $100!  (For example, $70 for the short full skirted black number below, and only $65 for the cute short coral one next to it! The long dresses are around $125)

Why let your girls have all of the fun? You can rent something fabulous for your wedding related events too! Any of these lovelies would look fantastic at your bachelorette party or rehearsal dinner! 

So what do you think? Would you consider renting your bridesmaid dresses? 

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