Store of the Week- Rent Frock Repeat

By: Amanda Phuong

Imagine you’ve got a friend’s wedding coming up and you’ve got nothing to wear. You scavenge your closet, peruse online shops, but all options either rob you of your riches or just don’t seem right. Fortunately, the co-founders of Rent Frock Repeat were once in the exact same situation and have set out to solve wardrobe crisis’s one dress at a time. It was not long ago that Lisa Delorme and Kristy Wieber were pulling the hair out of their heads, trying to find outfits for a friend’s wedding. “We were sitting around saying, ‘I don’t like anything in my closet,’ ‘everyone’s seen it,’ ‘it’s out of style,’ or ‘it doesn’t fit” and I don’t want to spend four or five hundred dollars on a dress I know I’m only going to wear once,” Kristy states. It was at this moment, that the ladies came across an ad in a magazine for dress rentals. “We thought, ‘this is awesome!’ But they didn’t ship to Canada. It was a light bulb moment. This is something we could do. We could bring this to Canada. If this issomething we would love, we think other women would love it too.”

In 2010, Rent, Frock, Repeat was born. Based in Toronto, the company is now home to over 150 styles and over 800 contemporary dresses that come straight from the runways of Toronto and New York Fashion Week. We highly recommend booking a fitting appointment and taking a walk through their showroom. You will immediately feel as if you are walking into fashion lover’s abyss; where cocktail gowns, feathers, leather and all things glamorous coexist in one room. However, if you’re the type of shopper that always needs a second opinion, fret not! Rent Frock Repeat offers private fitting parties, so you can bring all your girlfriends to sip on champagne and test out designer duds. “What it’s kind of evolved into is girls coming for their birthday parties and bachelorette parties. They’ll literally leave with the dress on, go out, leave their clothes here in a locker and bring the dress back in a few days” laughs Lisa. Alongside their impressive collection stands an impressive online presence. Women all over Canada are able to rent directly off the site and have the dress of their choice shipped directly to their home. To ease the picking process, the collection is searchable by body type, color, designer and style. All dresses are shot on live models of different sizes and favorites can be saved to a
personal profile online.

As silly as it seems, picking the perfect outfit for an event can feel like a life or death situation, but the ladies of Rent Frock Repeat have worked hard to make it a headache free process. The ladies left us with some words of wisdom for the wonderful world of rental dresses, “We say come in when you don’t even have an event. Try on the dresses and then save all the favorites to your online profile. That way when [you] do get an invite, there’s not the panic of ‘what am I going to wear?’ Now [you] can concentrate on hair, makeup, shoes, or whatever it is [you] have to do.” With a plus size line to be released in August and Pop-up shop fittings (where women can try dresses on for no cost and save their choices to their online profile) to be scheduled across Canada, this duo is turning the regular retail model on its head and are making strides towards world domination.

See photos from our visit below: 

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