Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media's Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property

by Minh-Ha T. Pham

Overview

In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design. In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478023210
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/08/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Minh-Ha T. Pham is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and author of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. “Share This with Your Friends”: Crowdsourcing IP Regulation  1
1. Regulating Fashion IP, Regulating Difference  27
2. The Asian Fashion Copycat  53
3. How Thai Social Media Users Made Balenciaga Pay for Copying the Sampeng Bag  77
4. “Ppl Knocking Each Other off Lol”: Diet Prada’s Politics of Refusal  99
Epilogue. Why We Can't Have Nice Things  125
Notes  131
Bibliography 147
Index  165

What People are Saying About This

The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era - Roopali Mukherjee

“What are social media users doing when they join in crowdsourced digital outrage against fashion copycatting? Staging an urgent and essential conversation among critical race, intellectual property, digital labor, and global fashion scholars, Minh-Ha T. Pham reveals what is at stake within struggles over fashion creativity and impropriety. She tracks the new ethics of consumer social responsibility and routines of casualized and hyper-visible digital labor that work to reproduce white Western standards of fashion ethics, taste, and intellectual property.”

The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation - Christopher Sprigman

“Minh-Ha T. Pham has written the first definitive sociological account of ‘crowdsourced IP regulation’—that is, the mostly unpaid labor of fashion blogs and social media accounts in policing fashion knockoffs. Pham’s book immerses us in a new world of volunteer regulators scouring the internet for evidence of copying, calling out what they perceive as ‘fake’ (often without regard to whether the copies are illegal or not), and, whether intentionally or otherwise, reinforcing elite luxury brands’ stranglehold on fashion innovation.”

Editorial Reviews

"Pham's work offers a thorough look at how online behavior is shaping fashion industry actions and sheds light on the ways the current norms are failing some communities while granting protections to others."
--Sarah Bartlett Schroeder "Library Journal" (7/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

06/01/2022

Focusing on how social media users participate in fashion's complex intellectual property system, this book challenges traditional Western notions of what constitutes a knockoff, fake, or copy. It also questions the power dynamics at play when a global market is held to Western standards of copyright and explores the role of anti-Asian racism in the discourse about piracy and intellectual property. Pham argues that social media users are playing an unrecognized, uncompensated regulatory role in the fashion industry, regularly drawing attention to unauthorized copying of other designers' work. Pham uses several well-chosen case studies to illustrate the argument that social media users have a real impact on fashion. In one instance, Thai social media users pointed out the strong similarities between an expensive Balenciaga bag and a rainbow-striped shopping bag popular with Thai people. In another, Pham looks in-depth at the work of the popular social media account Diet Prada. VERDICT Pham's work offers a thorough look at how online behavior is shaping fashion industry actions and sheds light on the ways the current norms are failing some communities while granting protections to others.—Sarah Bartlett Schroeder

Library Journal