Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion''s Sins

An insiders look at how the rise of fast fashion obstructs ethical shopping and fuels the abuse and neglect of garment workers

With years of expertise in the fashion industry, Alyssas reporting is consistently deep and thoughtful, and her work on sustainability and ethics has changed how I view the clothes I wear.
Brittney McNamara, features director at Teen Vogue

Ours is the era of fast fashion: a time of cheap and constantly changing styles for consumers of every stripe, with new clothing hitting the racks every season as social mediafueled tastes shift.

Worn Out examines the underside of our historic clothing binge and the fashion industrys fall from grace. Former InStyle senior news editor and seasoned journalist Alyssa Hardys riveting work explores the lives of the millions of garment workersmostly women of colorwho toil in the fashion industry around the worldfrom LA-based sweatshop employees who experience sexual abuse while stitching clothes for H&M, Fashion Nova, and Levis to homeworkers in Indonesia who are unknowingly given carcinogenic materials to work with. Worn Out exposes the complicity of celebrities whose endorsements obscure the exploitation behind marquee brands and also includes interviews with designers such as Mara Hoffman, whose business models are based on ethical production standards.

Like many of us, Hardy believes in the personal, political, and cultural place fashion has in our lives, from seed to sew to closet, and that it is still okay to indulge in its glitz and glamour. But the time has come, she argues, to force real change on an industry that prefers to keep its dark side behind the runway curtain. The perfect book for people who are passionate about clothing and style, Worn Out seeks to engage in a real conversation about who gets harmed by fast fashionand offers meaningful solutions for change.