Fashion pickle

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the new clothing rental app Pickle, streaming news, and Caroline Calloway’s Scammer.

The dress I wore to junior prom was a rental. It was a shade of off-white that was more yellow than cream and two inches too long for me. I remember absolutely hating the dress, an experience that made me averse to renting clothes through college. It wasn’t until I moved to the East Coast that I finally understood the appeal of renting clothes. To avoid wearing the same ugly puffer jacket for the four-month duration of winter, I began testing out a variety of rental services.

Since its launch in 2019, my favorite for everyday clothing has been Nuuly, a monthly clothing subscription service from Urban Outfitters that costs $98 a month (it used to cost $88) for six items. For special events like weddings or birthdays, I prefer Rent the Runway, although the service requires some planning, as popular styles tend to be rented out come wedding season.

Recently, Pickle has landed on my radar, thanks to TikTok. (The company is spending $500 to $600 a week on ads, Glossy reports, mostly for creator-made content.) Pickle is a shopping community app that allows you to rent items from local users’ closets. In New York, it mostly appears to be influencers and rich women with designer closets who are renting out their clothes. As a result, there are a lot more options for thin users than for those who are plus-sized.

The upside to Pickle is that it’s a lower-cost alternative to Rent the Runway and works well for last-minute rentals: The rental process is much more informal. Once you’ve paid, you can message the person you’re renting from and coordinate a direct pick-up or, as the app likes to advertise, same-day shipping. Prices for rentals are also across the board, and determined by the individual user. The rental average is $45 to $50, according to Glossy, and users keep 80 percent of the earnings. Pickle also functions as a resale marketplace. Some rentable items are available to be bought secondhand.

Since the app is fairly new, it’s not quite as intuitive to use and mechanisms for discovery are lacking. Most users seem to be renting from influencers who’ve partnered with Pickle, not regular people’s closets.

However, I have seen some people put up their I AM GIA or Verge Girl dresses, brands that retail for around $100 to $200, up for $70 to $90 rental, which is frankly absurd. Random pricing is not just a problem for Pickle. It’s a common point of tension in the secondhand marketplace, which I’ve previously reported on for Vox: Pre-owned garments have a wide margin for price fluctuation. Many consumers often end up paying well-above-average prices for pre-owned items (or rentals, in Pickle’s case) that aren’t all that special.

On the other hand, I’ve also spotted some fairly-priced deals: $100 for a two-day rental of a Marchesa Notte gown, which retails for over $1,000, is a pretty good price. I ended up renting a $500 Dion Lee top for a costume party I attended Saturday night, which cost me $55 for a three-day period. The only option was to pick it up and drop it off at the rentee’s residence, which worked out fine since she lives in a building with a doorman. And since I was too busy to return the garment on Sunday, I was told to just return it on Monday at my convenience.

Pickle, unlike other more established clothing services, benefits from the casual-ness of its user interactions. It works like Depop, in the sense that users have to interact with one another for the transaction to occur. Since the service is hyperlocal, using Pickle feels like you’re borrowing from the closet of your most fashionable friend.

THE TASTE ECONOMY

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Paramount+ issues more show cancellations, as it prepares to incorporate Showtime content onto its platform. (The Hollywood Reporter)

• After watching the teaser trailer for Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, my only thought is: Is there an angle where Jacob Elordi doesn’t look 6′ 5″?

• Dirt friend @annagrigoryan recommends Klassiki, a streaming platform with a good selection of films from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

• Production of Across the Spider-Verse was reportedly so arduous that about 100 artists left the project before its completion. (Vulture)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Agnes Callard makes a case against travel. (New Yorker)

• Amanda Mull investigates the big business of vape shops. (The Atlantic)

• Strawberry season is here, and I’m making Claire Saffitz’s delightfully fluffy strawberry ricotta scones.

• I do my best to care very little about Caroline Calloway, but Becca Rothfeld’s review of Calloway’s self-published memoir Scammer has certainly piqued my interest. Rothfeld, whose criticism I adore, describes Scammer as “outrageous, turbulent and as raw as a wound, but good, the kind of book you read in a single shudder.” To my surprise, Rothfeld was also quite generous towards Natalie Beach’s essay collection Adult Drama, which I read last month. (In 2019, Beach published an essay in The Cut on the difficulties of being Calloway’s friend and ghostwriter.) To me, Beach’s prose style and most of her subject matters (Abercrombie & Fitch jeans, odd jobs, estate sales, teenage heartbreak) felt quite dated (emblematic of what Jia Tolentino called the mid-2010s personal essay boom) and, for that reason, not very compelling. As for Calloway’s book, I’m not sure I will ever read it because it costs $65.

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