Christine Hunsicker was in her friend’s Palo Alto, California, backyard in 2011 wondering how every woman could have the kind of infinite clothing closet she’d grown up with. As a kid in rural Pennsylvania, her family wasn’t particularly wealthy, yet she was always playing dress-up in outfits, like a penguin-print maxi dress or a shimmering sequin skirt, made by her seamstress aunt. A clothing-rental subscription company could be a blockbuster business, she thought. She even had a name for it, inspired by a character from a book she’d once imagined but never wrote: Gwynnie Bee.
Hunsicker was obsessed with Rent ...