She is so proud of adopting this approach that she openly admits to her friends that she rents clothes instead of buying them. She has even recommended clothing rental services to many of her peers.

Consumers like Shen, who are open to renting fashion items, are driving the sharing economy within the fashion industry, which has been slow to jump on the bandwagon, says Clement Tang, CEO of Le Tote China, an online clothing rental company that originated in San Francisco in 2012.

According to the State Information Center, China's sharing economy was worth 2.94 trillion yuan by 2018, an increase of 41 percent year-on-year, and more than 760 million Chinese-over half the country's population-have paid for shared services or products.

The center also estimated that the annual growth rate in the sharing economy in China would remain steady at around 30 percent over the next three years.