My name is Irina Alexander and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.

A few weeks ago I had a story on the cover of the magazine about the collapse of the fashion industry.

In April, I was sitting at home, I was bored, and my editor and I were on the phone and she said,

well, what's happening with the fashion industry right now? Because we saw these other industries like restaurants and everybody else, the film industry was struggling.

And I said, well, actually, I have no idea what's happening in fashion. I mean, I feel like everyone's wearing sweatpants.

But I said, you know, I met this guy about a year ago who used to design band of outsiders who was Scott Sternberg and I said,

let me reach out to him and see if maybe he knows what's happening in the fashion industry.

And Scott and I happened to live in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles. So every day I was trying to find destinations I could walk to to just get out of my house.

And one day I walked to his house and I sort of very casually asked him what's happening in the fashion industry.

The minute he started talking, I realized that the story was so much bigger than I had anticipated.

I'd been covering the fashion industry on and off for about a decade.

And I knew that the industry had been in trouble long before the pandemic.

But I didn't realize just how bad it had been and how there had been this ginormous bubble of overproduction with too many shows and too many collections and too many clothes and a sort of set of people who had acted so irresponsibly in a way that really kind of drove the industry into the ground.

It really reminded me of 2008 and the financial crash.

And I thought what if you tried to write about the fashion industry the way you would any other bubble like the subprime mortgage crisis and really got into what happened to the industry on a really granular level.

So here's my story called Sweatpants Forever, read by Julia Whalen.

It's difficult in retrospect to pinpoint when exactly panic about coronavirus took hold in the United States, but March 12 stands out.

Stores ran out of canned goods, streets emptied of cars, Tom Hanks had just tested positive for the virus.

That evening, Scott Sternberg, a fashion designer, was lying awake at home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles thinking about entire world, a line of basics he founded two years earlier.

Would people still buy clothes? How much cash did he have to keep going? When would he have to lay people off?

My band of outsiders battle scars just opened wide, he said.

Band of outsiders was Sternberg's previous company. He founded it in 2004 as a line of slim shirts and ties. Remember the skinny Thai boom? That was Sternberg.

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