Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Paperback)

Minh-Ha T. Pham

ISBN 10: 1478018615 / ISBN 13: 9781478018612

Published by Duke University Press, North Carolina, 2022

About this Item

Paperback. 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. Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the practice of social media users monitoring the fashion market for the appearance of fake knock-off fashion, design theft, and plagiarism, showing how it is critically important to the development of global fashion. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781478018612

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Why We Can't Have Nice Things (Paperback)
• Publisher: Duke University Press, North Carolina
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478018615
• ISBN 13: 9781478018612
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.