Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property Minh-Ha T. Pham

September 184 pages, 15 illustrations paper, 978-1-4780-1861-2 $24.95/£18.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1598-7 $94.95/£76.00

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.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property MINH-HA T. PHAM

“What are social media users doing when they join in crowdsourced digital outrage against fashion copycatting? Staging an urgent and essential conversation between 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.”—ROOPALI MUKHERJEE, author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era

“Minh-Ha T. Pham has written the first definitive sociological account of ‘crowdsourced IP regulation’—i.e., 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.”—CHRISTOPHER SPRIGMAN, coauthor of The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation

In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Parisbased 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 MinhHa 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.

Also by Minh-Ha T. Pham

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging