Important conversations are often some of the most difficult. For those of us who've grown up in an environment of media over saturation and social media expansion, fashion has become an ever increasing part of our identity. Hardy understands and respects this aspect of why so many people love fashion. She allows the reader to love and enjoy fashion while also examining why we should strive for the fashion industry as a whole to do better. You can love something and strive for its improvement. That sort of attitude can be hard to come by in books criticizing the fashion industry and the consumption it promotes.

I appreciated that the core message of this book did not waver. Hardy touches on multiple problematic aspects of the industry, but always brings them back to the touchstone of her thesis: the often invisible and most vulnerable populations impacted by fashion. The skilled, undervalued, and underpaid workers who construct the garments we often treat as disposable. Showing how all of our other concerns tie back to this one fundamental issue, helps alleviate the overwhelm that can occur when reading about a large system that has become so dysfunctional. My only critique here is that some of the specific anecdotes and talking points are repeated multiple times. In a book that is relatively shorter, these repetitions can be shortened to references versus full retellings.

If you’ve done any reading on scandals within the fashion industry, this book won’t necessarily be hard-hitting. In my opinion, Alyssa Hardy’s book reads more like a memoir than a work of investigative journalism. That said, its contents are still very insightful - and Hardy’s perspective (as a former fashion editor) is appreciated.
She breaks down the cultural and political aspects of fashion within our culture in a way that’s easily digestible. Hardy touches on a variety of topics ranging from celebrity/influencer marketing and greenwashing to labor injustice and sexual harassment. Altogether a worthwhile read.

WORN OUT by Alyssa Hardy is a new non-fiction work about fast fashion, a high interest topic for our students. Hardy is a former senior news editor at InStyle and fashion news editor at Teen Vogue; she clearly has a message to convey: "loving fashion is not the problem, it's the ways in which we consume it that can be." Writing for New Press, a nonprofit, public interest publisher, Hardy concentrates on discussing the fashion industry's relationship with climate change and poor labor conditions. In her Introduction, Hardy refers to changing fashion tastes during the pandemic and eloquently points out, "When we praised essential workers, no one talked about people behind the sewing machines." She relates numerous examples of worker mistreatment, including by brands like Guess, Forever 21, and American Apparel. Her passion is evident, but she often writes in first person and frames the stories with her personal experience, including limited notes or references. Our student researchers are likely to find more background, statistics, and suggested action steps in slightly older works like Fashionopolis, and Unraveled. WORN OUT, described by Publishers Weekly as a "scorching exposé," could serve as a supplementary text with profiles of poor business practices and recent activists.

I wish I had read this book sooner. It's packed with information and very well-structured. I wouldn't say the topics explored in Worn Out are basics, the 101 knowledge, but even so, I felt like it was perfect as a beginner's guide into the problems of the fashion industry. I appreciated that the author didn't only rely on her own experience in the fashion business to explain the many issues we are currently facing, but made sure to include the stories of other people, from company owners, to models and especially to the underpaid workers who make the actual pieces of clothing. There was also a commendable effort to talk about the fashion industry problems in an international perspective, including people from different countries and cultures into her interviews. This in particular won me over. Worn Out is a very important book, about topics we should all be reflecting on. I will certainly keep this in my shelves.

Worn Out by Alyssa Hardy offers an update on the ethical problems of fast fashion and overconsumption of apparel in general, as well as the many shortcomings of fashion as an industry. She covers the usual gamut of human rights abuses in the garment industry, though with a useful greater than normal emphasis on U.S. domestic issue, as well as environmental issues, from the resources involved in apparel production to the myth that we can actually dispose of our garment glut. What is new is attention to the role played by Covid (including the way in which labor exploitation simply carried over to mask-making), the role of celebrity endorsers/labels and Instagram in general (e.g., encouraging “hauls” by everyday people and the ridiculous notion of “influencers” who constantly consume in order to generate more and more ridiculous content for their ridiculous posts), and the consequences of Prime Day and Black Friday. The most interesting parts to me were attention to the long overlooked flaws in the fashion industry itself (lack of diversity, rampant #MeToo issues) and a discussion of the various harms involved in the market for counterfeit goods. In short, I learned a few things, which, frankly, surprised me given the number of books like this I have read. Worn Out is a valuable addition to books on consumer ethics. Buyer beware (or better yet, be self-aware).

*I received a copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this opportunity*

WORN OUT is an "Insider's Look" into the world behind the glossy magazines and mindless online shopping. This book, not exactly a hard-hitting expose but definitely eye opening for anyone not intimately involved in the fashion industry.

Most cosumers are aware of the issues with fast-fashion: including, but not limited to: worker explotation, waste creation, diversity inclusion/exclusion, counterfiets, greenwashing, and slave use. All of these topics (and more) are explored in WORN OUT-- mostly through personal commentary and anecdotes, interview material collected by the author, and examples found in popular culture.

This book is not meant to, in my opinion, offer any previously unknown facts-- but instead acts as a looking glass to which the common western consumer can look at the mess their consumption has caused. But it's not all doom and gloom, Alyssa Harding provides some options for the everyday person, as well as the corporation and designers, to improving our practices.

Back when I was pregnant with my daughter, I read Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline and was shocked by it. I had never really thought about clothing and the damage it does to the earth, and to the people who made it, before. The book was fascinating and needless to say, I haven’t looked at clothing the same way since. Browsing through NetGalley made me aware of the existence of Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion’s Sins by Alyssa Hardy (New Press, 2022) and it got me wondering: what’s changed? How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the world of fashion? Has anything gotten any better? I hit the request button and was delighted to receive my acceptance just hours later. Huge thanks to NetGalley, Alyssa Hardy, and New Press for allowing me to read and review an early copy of Worn Out.

What happens to all our used clothes? We bag them up, drop them at Goodwill or another thrift store or bin, and then…what? Alyssa Hardy begins Worn Out with a bang, describing the secondhand markets in Ghana, where over fifteen million items of clothing, mostly from Europe and North America, end up. Western society is incredibly wasteful, habits that extend to our clothing usage as well, and this has not just ripple effects, but entire tsunami effects, around the world. Homegrown garment industries collapse because our garment industry overwhelms them. Children work these secondhand markets. Women die for low-paying garment factory jobs, as we saw in the Dhaka garment factory collapse in 2013, and for what? So we can buy an item of clothing made with such cheap materials that it falls apart in the wash within a few months. This has to stop, Alyssa Hardy argues, and she backs up her argument with devastating example after devastating example.

Beyond giving the fashion industry, from cotton field to salesroom floor, a hard look, Ms. Hardy turns her criticism on the fashion consumer. We’ve lost the inability to distinguish need from want, she points out, and in shying away or refusing to examine our lives and habits, we’ve created entire identities based on what we purchase, assigning ourselves in-group status based on what we wear. And in doing so, we’ve helped to create abhorrent conditions not only around the world, but in our very own backyards. American sweatshops exist. Women, who make up the majority of garment workers, make $4-6 per hour, working sixty-hour weeks. They’re sexually harassed and raped by the bosses who threaten to fire them if they speak up. Some make as little as $3.75 per day. “The bottom line is that we want too much at a cost that feels low but is expensive in other ways,” writes Ms. Hardy, and she’s correct. This is a mess that we as a society have created.

Worn Out is a reckoning for the fashion industry and the western consumer. From #metoo’s impact on the fashion industry as a whole, wage theft and wretched working conditions in garment factories around the world (such as Nike paying workers 12 cents per shoe, or Shein forcing 75-hour workweeks from their employees and having no emergency exits in their Chinese garment factories), the lack of inclusion in the fashion industry when it comes to plus-size and disabled models and thus lack of appropriate clothing for these groups, the damage done by influencers and what they should *really* be doing, the use of forced Uyghur labor (about one-fifth of all cotton garments around the world contain material from the Uyghur region in China; odds are, something in your closet was made by Uyghur slave labor), the environmental cost of the industry, Alyssa Hardy shines a light on it all. It’s not all hopeless, though; there are steps we can take, she tells us, to force the industry’s hand…but it’s not going to be easy, and it may be more collective effort than we have in us.

An incredible book that will change the way you shop. Read it; live it; tell your friends. Garment workers around the world deserve a better life, and only we as consumers can help make that a reality if we push the fashion industry, hard.

More Memoir Than Investigative Expose. At least for me, the current description as I write this review nearly three months before the book's scheduled publication reads more that this book would have been an investigative expose similar to Maxine Bedat's 2021 book Unraveled. And while many similar issues are discussed - from the rampant sex abuse in sweatshops to the mass markets in Africa where fast fashion castoffs that don't wind up in landfills ultimately wind up, among others - this is still mostly a memoir based narrative with some interviews to back up Hardy's own observations from her career in fashion. A career Hardy mentions a few times she left, and which becomes clear she is still processing her time within. Still, as a bit of an "insider's look" rather than active investigative journalism, this tale largely works and it does show a lot of the perils of the modern fast fashion industry. Indeed, the book really only suffers from two flaws: One is that it discusses COVID frequently, and I am on a one-man crusade against any book that mentions COVID for any reason at all. My only real tool in this crusade is a one-star deduction, and therefore it applies here. The second star deduction comes from the dearth of a bibliography. Even for similar memoir-based narratives and even with my extensive experience working with these narratives in advance reader copy form, the bibliography here is quite small, clocking in at just 2% or so of the text - when 10% is more normal even for this particular type of narrative, and 20-30% is more normal for nonfiction more generally. Still, for what it is and what it discusses, this book is well written and engaging (and a fairly quick read, for those looking for that), and is reasonably solid given the caveats above. Very much recommended.