From the Diary of Simonetta Sermoneta

A Frankfurt founder on the outfit you buy for one evening and never wear again, and the simpler option she wants you to try before the Christmas party.

Think about the last dress you bought for a single evening. A business event, a wedding, a christening, a graduation ball, the office Christmas party, a date night. It was worn, it was photographed, and it has hung in the wardrobe ever since.

That corner of the wardrobe is a national one. A Greenpeace survey of 1,001 adults in Germany, published in December 2025, puts around five billion garments in the country’s wardrobes and finds that roughly a third of them are worn rarely or almost never.

Simonetta Sermoneta’s answer to it came from London. “Renting there is completely normal: women rent for weddings, parties and the office,” she says. “I remember thinking, this simply doesn’t exist in Germany. That gap was the moment I knew the concept of Fashion Rental had to exist.”

fashionrentalBAR is that concept, built in Frankfurt. It’s an online boutique where you don’t buy the dress, you borrow it. You browse, pick a look for your occasion and choose the date. It arrives at your door, you wear it, and you send it back. Cleaning and insurance are already included. The site went live on September 27 after a test phase with her first customers, and Simonetta runs it alongside her job as a Senior Executive Assistant at a consulting firm.

What arrives at your door

She’s careful about what she’s asking for. “I’m not asking anyone to stop buying clothes,” she says. “You’ll still buy your favourite jeans and the perfect white T-shirt.” The case is for the big moments only.

“For the big moments, like a business event, a wedding, a christening, a graduation ball, the Christmas party, New Year’s Eve, a birthday, a date night or a girls’ night out, renting is the smarter choice. It spares your wardrobe, saves you money and does the planet a favour, and you lose none of the fun of fashion.”

Simonetta Sermoneta, Founder, fashionrentalBAR

What the customer gets, in her words: “You get to try styles you might never risk buying, dress for every occasion without a big purchase, and you never add one more dress to the ‘worn once, now hanging there forever’ corner of your wardrobe.”

In a LinkedIn post this summer, written in German, she took on the idea that renting must be complicated. She used to think so too, she wrote, until she noticed that we book things every day that sound just as complex, a flight, a hotel, and they’re done in three minutes. A dress for the next wedding is exactly as simple: choose it, pick a date, have it delivered, enjoy the event, send it back. In ten years, she wrote, the idea that renting a dress is too complicated will sound the way the idea that you can’t buy clothes online sounded in 1995.

Getting the dress is the easy part. What stops people, she says, happens before they reach the site.

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“What if I damage it?”

Two things get in the way, in her experience, and only one of them is about renting. “Germans are far too cautious with fashion,” she says. “Look around any German city and you’ll see a lot of grey and black. We live in one of the safest, freest countries in the world, so we have every reason to have more fun with what we wear.”

The second is the fear of renting itself. “The questions I hear most are ‘What if I damage it?’ and ‘What about cleaning?’” she says. “The truth is that it’s all included in the package. Insurance, dry cleaning and the work after the rental are our job, not the customer’s. The worry costs you nothing, but it holds a lot of women back from even trying.”

The German numbers say the same. In the same Greenpeace survey, 88 percent of respondents had never rented clothing from a commercial provider, and asked whether they could imagine renting an outfit for Christmas, New Year’s Eve or the office party through a rental service, 7 percent said yes.

Her answer to a hesitant customer is what she has seen so far: “Everyone who has tried it so far has loved it and wants to rent again.”

She learned how to talk to a hesitant customer on a shop floor, among other places.

Every chapter, a piece of the puzzle

Simonetta trained in banking in Augsburg before she studied fashion management at the Mediadesign University of Applied Sciences, and the jobs that followed have been, by her account, a set of very different chapters. “Every step mattered,” she says, “because each gave me a different piece of the puzzle: business, fashion, rental and finally founding.”

Three of them she singles out. The first is the job she still holds. “Working as an Executive Assistant taught me structure: how to approach anything methodically. It also gave me a real love for planning events, which is exactly what my customers are doing when they rent from me and it helps me of course to structure my very own first business.”

The second was a year and a half as Social Media Manager at nicolemohrmann.com in Munich, which “showed me that social media has become a business discipline in its own right. Thirty minutes of Stories a day isn’t enough anymore, because the algorithm is incredibly demanding. For an online business your feed is your only shop window, so it has to be treated that way.”

The third was the shop floor, as Store Manager at Subdued in London, which “taught me that the customer is queen. Whether your store is on a high street or online, your job is to make every customer feel comfortable and give her an experience she wants to come back to.”

“I could name ten more turns,” she says. “The point is that I could only build fashionrentalBAR because of all these very different chapters.”

“Right now, I’m a solo founder doing everything myself, from finance and warehouse to marketing and customer service. It’s a lot, but having seen each of those areas before makes it manageable. The surprises keep coming, but I always know how to approach them, and that’s worth a great deal.”

Simonetta, Founder, fashionrentalBAR

One of the surprises was a no.

The store that didn’t open

“I wanted to open fashionrentalBAR as a physical store,” she says. “Investors and advisors told me a clear no. It was hard to hear, but I’m grateful now. Retail rents in Frankfurt are enormous, and for a concept many people still see as ‘new’, that would have been a heavy fixed cost from day one.”

So she is building the community online first and running the business alongside her job, “with far less financial risk,” as she puts it. The store isn’t off the table. “Who knows, maybe in two or three years we’ll open the first fashionrentalBAR store.”

The store wasn’t the first version of the idea to go.

Six years of saying never

In a LinkedIn post at the end of September, written in German a few days after the site went live, Simonetta described sitting in Rome exactly a year earlier with what she called business model 10.0 already worked out in her head, and everything feeling wrong. She had been thinking about a collection of her own, SiSe, and about moving from sustainability toward conventional consumption, because that would probably sell better. It had felt, she wrote, more like a means to an end than something that touched her heart. In April 2026 came the turn, and she listened to her heart.

For six years, she wrote, she had said she would never see fashion rental as an online business. Business models one to nine had to be tried before she saw for herself that they wouldn’t work. “IT’S A PROCESS,” she wrote, a line she said she had cursed, and patience turned out to be the answer. In the post marking the company’s registration she wrote that companies are founded every day, but this one was special to her: six years of an idea, now official, and her heart was dancing.

She hasn’t done it alone. “I’ve had a mentor at every stage: Josephine Ackerman at Deutsche Bank, Bastian Winkler at Hermès, and Nicole Mohrmann during and after university, plus many more,” she says.

“But the person who made me who I am is my mum. She has had my back and supported me emotionally at every step. You always have to do it yourself, but knowing there’s someone you can call to just breathe together for a minute makes all the difference.”

Simonetta, Founder, fashionrentalBAR

What she is doing it for is in the post in which she introduced herself on LinkedIn as a fashion lover and a pure idealist. Her belief, she wrote, is this: if she can get to the point where, of ten dresses, nine are bought and one is rented, think of the impact that alone would have.

The first chance to move that number comes in November.

Where Simonetta Is Now

“We’re at the very beginning, and that’s the exciting part,” she says. fashionrentalBAR went live on September 27 after a test phase with her first customers. The community is growing, mostly on Instagram, and the response in the month since, she says, has been fantastic: people are thrilled that the site is finally live. “The real test starts in November, when Christmas party season begins and women start looking for that one outfit for the evening. That’s exactly the moment rental was made for.”

What she wants from this piece she says plainly: that people stop and think about renting fashion and ask themselves whether it could work for them too. The reader she has in mind is “a woman who loves trying new things, wants to reinvent herself now and then, is curious to experiment with a new style, and quietly feels she no longer wants to feed the fast-fashion machine.”

Outside work there is Dingo II Harvey Specter Sermoneta, her dog. “My smartest and most creative ideas have all come to me on walks with him,” she says. “I hope he outlives us all.”

For anyone still at the browsing stage, she has the line she gives every hesitant customer. “The hard part is the first step, not the experience.”

Five Lines from Simonetta’s Diary

“Germans are far too cautious with fashion.”
“For an online business your feed is your only shop window, so it has to be treated that way.”
“We’re at the very beginning, and that’s the exciting part.”
“Everyone who has tried it so far has loved it and wants to rent again.”
“My smartest and most creative ideas have all come to me on walks with him.”