Lizzie Dibble started With Love From… in 2023 as a simple clothes swap between friends and family. It has since grown into a lending collection of around four hundred garments, checked out with a barcode for three weeks at a time and renewed exactly like a library book, run out of a public library in Shropshire, not far over the border from here.
What struck me reading about this was not really the clothes themselves. It was the choice of venue.
Why a Library, Specifically
Dibble has been direct about why she wanted this to sit inside an actual public library rather than a standalone shop or a market stall. A library is not an intimidating boutique. Nobody feels judged by the music playing, or out of place browsing without buying anything. She has heard from people who avoid certain shops entirely because the atmosphere itself makes them feel like they don’t belong there, and a library carries none of that weight. It is, as she put it, welcoming and accessible in a way a conventional retail space rarely manages to be.
That observation lines up with something similar happening across the Atlantic, in Dover, New Hampshire, where the creator of a pilot clothing library made a related point. Borrowing is already a completely normal behaviour inside a library. Nobody has to be taught how to do it, or convinced that borrowing rather than owning is an acceptable way to get what you need. The library format doesn’t just house the clothes. It quietly imports decades of trust and familiarity that a new sustainability initiative would otherwise have to build entirely from scratch.
What’s Actually Being Lent
The Shropshire project labels every garment with the name of the person who donated it, a small detail that changes how a borrowed item feels rather than just how it functions. One borrower, a trainee textiles teacher, described the appeal precisely: browsing without worrying about a price tag, and finding things she would never have been drawn to in a shop or a rental app, because there was no pressure attached to the choice either way.
The collection has already expanded beyond its original library. This winter, Oswestry Library ran a month long pilot called the Shropshire Shared Wardrobe in partnership with the project, focused specifically on occasion wear, the party dresses, festive outfits and one off event clothing that tend to get worn once and then sit unused for years. Two hundred items were made available to browse, with library card holders invited to donate alongside borrowing, and organisers hoping to expand the collection further if the pilot succeeds, including into children’s occasion wear.
The American pilot in Dover took a similar focus on occasion wear specifically, reasoning that this category of clothing, bought for a single wedding or ski trip and rarely worn again afterward, is exactly where lending makes the most obvious sense. Nobody needs to own five formal dresses worn once each. A shared collection serving the same need across dozens of people solves the actual problem far more efficiently than everybody separately owning and then discarding their own.
A Familiar Pattern, Applied Somewhere New
None of this is entirely without precedent. Libraries of things, shared collections of tools, camping equipment, even board games, have been growing steadily across the country for some years now, and Dibble’s project is thought to be among the first to bring clothing specifically into that existing library lending system rather than running as a separate scheme alongside it. That matters because it means clothing libraries don’t need to invent new infrastructure or new habits. They can simply slot into a lending system millions of people already understand and already trust.
The Part Still Being Worked Out
It would be overstating things to suggest clothing libraries are close to displacing conventional shopping at any meaningful scale. Four hundred garments in Shropshire, two hundred items on loan for a month in Oswestry, a six week pilot in New Hampshire. These are genuinely small collections, dependent on donations rather than any guaranteed supply, and inevitably uneven in size, condition and range compared with an actual shop. A library card holder looking for something very specific, a particular size, a particular occasion, a particular colour, may simply not find it on the day they need it.
The people running these pilots seem entirely aware of that limitation rather than glossing over it. The vision described by the Dover project’s creator is a longer term one, clothing racks eventually finding a permanent home inside libraries rather than existing only as occasional pop-ups, potentially even staffed by people with genuine styling knowledge the way a librarian already helps with research or the photocopier. That is a considerably bigger ambition than what currently exists, and getting there depends on pilots like these building enough of a track record, and enough public appetite, to justify the permanent shelf space.
Why I Find the Idea Worth Watching
What appeals to me about this is not that it promises to solve fast fashion on its own, since a few hundred garments in a handful of towns clearly won’t. It’s the quiet logic of putting clothing inside an institution already built entirely around the idea that borrowing something for a while, then returning it for the next person, is simply normal. Libraries solved the trust and access problem for books generations ago. Whether the same solved problem can genuinely extend to clothing, at real scale rather than as a handful of well meaning local pilots, is not yet settled. But watching library card holders in Shropshire quietly renew a borrowed jumper the same way they’d renew an overdue novel feels like a genuinely promising place for that experiment to be starting from.
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