????但對自己正在從事的工作，弗雷斯根本就沒有興趣——她只是隨波逐流。“我不知道一個人是否一定會喜歡上某項工作，”她說。“我覺得臨界點可能出現在它占據了我太多生活空間的時候。我每天都工作很長時間，這份工作突然成為我生活的全部，我有點受不了了。”弗雷斯對現狀不滿的另一個跡象是：她利用周末經營一家名叫卡特招生服務(Carter Admissions)的公司，結果這個幫助高中生編輯大學申請文檔的副業大獲成功，帶給她的滿足感遠勝過日常工作。（在哈佛商學院的第一年，她擴大了業務范圍，同時開始提供網絡服務。）

????她此前曾申請過哥倫比亞大學法學院(Columbia Law School)，獲得了錄取。但弗雷斯突然意識到，她并沒有認真考慮過這是不是自己真正想要的東西。“我的確是在最后那一刻決定放棄的。我當時想，‘我并不是真的想當一名律師。如果是這樣，我為什么要去上法學院啊？這時候申請商學院是不是太晚了？’”此后一個半月內，她參加了GMAT考試，向哈佛商學院遞交了申請書，在第三輪面試中達成了心愿。

????開學第一天相識后，海曼和弗雷斯親密無間地度過了商學院的第一學年。然后，在第二年的感恩節，海曼在妹妹的小衣柜前，經歷了“靈光一現”的一刻。貝基解釋了她被迫掏大價錢購買新衣服的苦衷之后，海曼問：“你為什么要買一件瑪切薩禮服，而不是便宜一點的衣服呢？”【貝基當時是布盧明代爾百貨公司(Bloomingdale's)的一名采購員；她現在為Rent the Runway工作】貝基回答說：“穿好衣服漂亮唄。”海曼發現一個人的自信程度與奢華著裝存在聯系，Rent the Runway就是她貫徹這一理念的成果。這門生意所利用的正是年輕女性對時尚形象和感覺的強烈渴望，即使她們并不具備購買高端服飾的財力。

????貝基不知不覺地發現了一個問題，而海曼認為她已經構想了一個模糊的解決方案。“我們為什么不把所有這些你再也不打算穿的衣服收集在一起，然后租給其他人，為你自己創造一個收入流呢？”她建議道。她們并沒有真的打算把貝基的衣服租出去，但這件事不僅促使海曼開始思考為什么女性被迫盛裝打扮這 抽象問題，還讓她萌生了出租禮服的念頭。

????假期后返回哈佛的第一天，海曼就利用午餐間隙給弗雷斯講述了妹妹的衣柜故事。“我當時并沒有產生借此機會創業的意圖或想法，”她說。“每次回家時，我總是跟貝基和家人討論這件事。但在我的腦子里，我真的不認為它可以成為一門生意。我只是覺得這樣做肯定挺好玩。”

????盡管如此，海曼和弗雷斯還是決定嘗試一下。為解決貝基和其他許多年輕女性面臨的這個難題，她們制定了一張路線圖。海曼和弗雷斯已經注意到、并開始思考兩種市場趨勢。其一是“共享經濟”——對于許多商品，人們不再購買，轉而采用了租賃方式。租賃的對象現在不僅僅是歌曲（比如Pandora公司提供的流媒體服務），影視作品（奈飛公司），甚至還包括汽車（比如Zipcar公司的轎車共享服務）。另一個動向是，Airbnb公司即將搭建一個公寓租賃平臺。其次就是她們覺得不易衡量，愈演愈烈的名人崇拜現象。在Twitter和Facebook等社交平臺的推動下，人們現在比以前更加關注金?卡戴珊這樣的名媛和流行文化明星，以及她們身穿的奢侈品牌。越來越多的女性希望在社交媒體上炫耀自己的奢華服飾，打造自己的個人品牌。海曼說：“我們的文化正在潛移默化地促使所有人渴望這種99%的人都無力負擔的生活方式。”????

????Yet Fleiss was never passionate about what she was doing -- she was coasting. "I didn't know that you necessarily would be or could be passionate about a job," she says. "And I guess the breaking point was once it became so much of my life, where it was like so many hours a day. It was suddenly the only thing I was doing. And that became a little much." A further sign of her restlessness: On weekends she was running a successful side business, Carter Admissions, that edited papers and prepared high school students to apply to colleges -- and enjoying it more than her real job. (During her first year at HBS, she expanded the concept and took it online.)

????She had applied to and gotten into Columbia Law School, but it occurred to her that she hadn't considered whether it was what she actually wanted. "I literally had this kind of last-minute, like, 'I don't really want to be a lawyer. What am I going to law school for? Is it too late to apply for business school?"?Within a month and a half, she had taken the GMAT, applied to HBS, and gotten in during its third round.

????After meeting on that first day, Hyman and Fleiss stayed close throughout their first year of business school and into their second. Then, during Thanksgiving break in their second year, Hyman had her "eureka moment" in front of her little sister's closet. After Becky explained how she had felt forced to overpay for a new dress, Hyman asked, "Why did you buy a Marchesa dress, as opposed to a cheaper one?" (Becky at the time was a buyer for Bloomingdale's; she now works for Rent the Runway.) Becky answered, "I want to feel beautiful." Hyman noted the association between self-confidence and luxury, and has carried that idea through to Rent the Runway, a business that trades on the desire of young women to look and feel fancy even if their wallets aren't equipped to own the very highest-end designer gowns.

????There was a problem Becky had unwittingly identified, and Hyman thought she had an inkling of a way to solve it. "Why don't we take all these dresses that you're never wearing again," she proposed, "and rent them out to other people, and create an income stream for yourself?" They weren't about to actually do that using Becky's dresses, but it got Hyman thinking about the concept of renting dresses, as well as the more abstract question of why women felt pressure to dress up.

????On the first day back at Harvard after vacation, a Monday, Hyman related the closet story to Fleiss over lunch. "I didn't go into it with the intention or the thinking that we would actually start something," she says. "Every time I would go home, I would be talking about it with Becky and with my family. But in my head I didn't really think it would be a company. I just thought it was something fun that we were working on."

????Still, they did work on it. They laid out a map for how they could solve the problem that Becky and so many other young women like her were having. There were two trends in the market that Hyman and Fleiss had noticed and were contemplating. One was the "sharing economy" and movement from ownership to renting. It was happening in music (with streaming services like Pandora), television and film (Netflix), and even automobiles, with car-sharing services like Zipcar. (Soon there would also be Airbnb, for renting out people's apartments.) The second, less measurable phenomenon they perceived was an increased saturation of celebrity worship -- social platforms like Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) were making people more aware than ever before of socialites and pop-culture stars like Kim Kardashian, and what luxury brands they were wearing. Women increasingly wanted to develop their own personal brands via social media to show off their luxury. "Our culture is educating an entire population of people to aspire to this lifestyle that 99% of us can't afford," Hyman says.