Lily Cole in conversation with Alain de Botton

Some people have it all, don’t they? Just look at supermodel, actress and businesswoman Lily Cole: so beautiful she was one of Vogue Paris’s top models of the 2000s and model of the year at the 2004 British Fashion Awards, and she's smart enough to earn herself a breezy Double First in History of Art at Cambridge University.

Then she wrote a book, Impossible Utopias, and now she's in conversation with writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, discussing how in fact, no, she doesn’t have it all. None of us do. Such are the trappings of consumer driven capitalism.

Lily Cole interview

No political system in the world has been able to provide as many far-reaching wonders as capitalism. And yet, as markets march along, spilling out good homes, fine wines and cheap, beautiful clothes, they also promote inequality and wreck our planet. Consumers become addicted to products that encourage irresponsible risk-taking and as our resources - physical and economic - are drained, deep fissures in our society are carved. It seems, however, we won’t do without it: many philosophers have noted that we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Capitalism in the 21st Century

In her book, Impossible Utopias, Cole imagines utopia as a real, ever-present possibility. As one of the world’s most in-demand supermodels and the face of some of the world’s most glamorous brands, Cole has a greater overview of the process and effects of capitalism than most. She’s seen how markets rarely value what matters to people, worshipping instead at the altar of margins and profit. But here, courtesy of The School of Life, she reveals how a gift economy in which real human needs and desires - not just those of the marketplace - might just be possible after all.