“The dualism Fashion/Non-Fashion contains a secret: Non-Fashion is still Fashion, and no pair of cargo shorts, no matter how bad they are, can ever resist the production of meaning—!” In light of the release of Empires Over Skin (2025), we linked up with the author, Meltdown Your Books, to help introduce the new book to you all with a dialogue which picks out several threads and starts pulling at them, and unravelling the text at the hems.