Renting vs. Buying a Dress for Special Occasions

With an event or two on your calendar, life is a little more exciting. They’re great reasons to get dressed up, spend an evening in glam, and make more memories with the people in your life. They can also, however, be expensive to prepare for.

Buying a new party dress for each event is fun, but strains the wallet quickly. On the other hand, choosing to rent a dress opens up your options without restricting you on cost (but it’s not necessarily everyone’s first choice).

In the rent vs buy dress debate, there isn’t one clear answer. It all depends on who you are and what you want from your evening. So today, we at Stylestarter are exploring the pros and cons of both options.

Renting vs Buying a Dress: At a Glance

Short on time? Here is a quick side-by-side comparison to help you weigh your options before diving into the details below: 

Buying a Dress for Your Event

First, there’s buying a dress for your event. This is likely something you have done before, and in all likelihood something you’ll do again. There’s a lot to love about the process: careful browsing, finding the dress, making sure it fits well, and accessorising it. And when the night is over, you get to hang onto the gown.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons.

Pros

There is a lot to love about buying a party dress to call your own. For one thing, that dress is entirely yours from the moment you take it off the rack, all the way until you pass it on. When you own a dress, you can wear it again, try different styles, lend it to a friend, or even hold onto it for sentimental value (if that’s your style). You don’t have to return the piece by a deadline, and you can alter it to fit your body shape.

All of these are great reasons to choose the latter half of the rent vs buy dress debate, even with the cons on the other side of the equation.

Cons

Choosing to rent vs buy a dress comes with cons as well as pros, as expected. The most present con is fairly predictable: the cost.

Buying a high-quality party dress at the level that most people want for a formal event runs into the hundreds, which can be hard to swallow if you’re only going to wear it once or twice. On top of that, if staying trendy matters to you, buying a new gown every time can add up fast.

Happily, there are ways to offset that. Buying a pre-loved formal dress, for example, is a great way to add a stunning new garment to your wardrobe at a much lower price. It’s not as cost-effective as renting, but if you want to keep the dress long-term, it is a solid middle-ground option.

Renting a Dress for Your Event

When debating the choice to rent vs buy a dress, many people narrow the pros of rental to pure cost. That’s natural, because it’s the most obvious benefit of choosing to rent a party dress instead of buying one. However, there are a host of other pros to think about, as well as one or two cons that might inform your choice. Let’s have a look.

Pros

On the rental side, the rent vs buy dress comparison is no competition when it comes to range. For the cost of buying a single high-quality dress, you could rent a series of different stunning gowns for different events, all from a curated, well-maintained selection of trending styles and designers that might otherwise be out of reach. No outfit repeats, and no limits on your personal style are both huge wins.

On top of that, the lower cost of a rental frees up your budget for the rest of your evening. You can put more toward dinner, accessories, the ride to and from the event, or other parts of life.

Not to mention, choosing to rent a dress means you’ll always have access to the latest styles. For example, our rental collections are regularly updated to reflect seasonal styles, so you’re not locked into the gown you bought eighteen months ago. You can choose a fresh look every single time.

Finally, choosing to rent vs. buy a dress means you can enjoy a lower-stakes evening with a new style. Try out a new silhouette or colour without worrying about how much it cost, and genuinely decide if it’s for you.

Cons

Naturally, renting a party dress instead of buying it outright has some downsides. The dress isn’t yours, for one thing, and for some people, that goes against their preference.

For another thing, some rental companies don’t carefully maintain the garments they lease, so finding a rental service you can trust might take some trial and error. We’re proud to say we maintain our stock carefully, and we always encourage you to check the dress on pick-up to ensure it’s exactly what you’re after.

The final question is around timing and availability. Popular styles book out, particularly around event-heavy periods. Planning ahead and booking early matters more with rental than with buying.

On balance, the debate to rent vs. buy a dress is one defined by two things above all: cost, and preference. Renting a dress gives you a huge variety of options at a much more manageable cost, and a reputable rental service makes the logistics easy. On the other hand, buying a dress costs more upfront, but the garment stays yours forever.

Consider your budget for the evening, how sure you are about the style, and whether you want to own one garment or try several for a spin. There, you’ll find your answer!

Rent the dress for your next event with Stylestarter.

You’re about to have a great night; why not dress the part? Explore our range of stunning party dress options for rent, each as beautiful as the last.