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

Author:   Minh-Ha T. Pham
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9781478015987


Pages:   160
Publication Date:   18 July 2022
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
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Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property


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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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Minh-Ha T. Pham
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9781478015987


ISBN 10:   1478015985
Pages:   160
Publication Date:   18 July 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available   Availability explained
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

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

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 *


Author Information

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.

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