In this Book
- Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property
- Book
- 2022
- Published by: Duke University Press
summary
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.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- 2. The Asian Fashion Copycat
- pp. 53-76
- Epilogue. Why We Can't Have Nice Things
- pp. 125-130
- Bibliography
- pp. 147-164
Additional Information
ISBN
9781478023210
Related ISBN(s)
9781478015987, 9781478018612
MARC Record
OCLC
1332523969
Launched on MUSE
2022-08-21
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2022