Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by the journalist Alyssa Hardy. She has worked as the fashion

news editor, Teen Vogue, and the senior news editor at In Style. She is the author of the book, Worn Out How Our Clothes

Cover Up Fashions, Sins, Available from the New Press. Alyssa Hardy, thank you so much

for joining us on current affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I want to start with, before we get to the sins of the fashion industry,

the fact that you are not, as I am not, anti-fashion.

No. You think that fashion could be a positive, a good force in the world. You like clothes.

You like people who like clothes. It's okay to like clothes. Is that right?

That is extremely right. I, in fact, love fashion. Yeah, because you can feel very guilty

when you start to find out about all this stuff, right?

Sure, and I think, I mean, there is a level of, you know, the guilt is okay a little bit too.

You can recognize the sort of downsides of fashion while understanding that it's like one of the greatest joys that we have as humans.

But I also feel like one thing that I got from reading your book was that we should also

think about the ways in which we love clothes and what it is we love about them.

Because, you know, you can love fashion or style while also recognizing that some of the things that we think we see

in clothes might be manufactured, right? Like the sense of something, well, going out of style

after a very short period of time. Sure. Yeah, I mean, fashion is a business at the end of the day, right? And so

trends and the cycles in which trends appear are part of the business of fashion and keeping

people buying and keeping you feeling like you need something more. Because, you know, if we all

just said, okay, this is our, my 10 pieces of clothing, which we should be doing,

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