"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."<br />   - Sarah Bartlett Schroeder (Library Journal) "Overall, in this book Minh-Ha T. Pham makes an important and unique contribution to the fields of media studies and critical race studies. The book will prove informative for scholars and students of these subjects and for those interested in the Thai or Vietnamese fashion industries and commerce as well as social media activism." - Sandra Kurfürst (Journal of Asian Studies) "Will poor taste ever go out of fashion? Find out now. Get yourself a copy of this book today." - Jane M. Ferguson (Sojourn) "Pham’s excellent discussion of social media users’ regulatory actions related to fashion copies is essential reading for those interested in fashion ethics. She challenges prevailing ideas around fashion inspiration and appropriation and provides a background of fashion knockoffs to illustrate how these ideas are based in racist and colonial histories. Her detailed discussion of Asian stereotypes is critical for understanding contemporary bias regarding fashion copies and her case studies demonstrate how these are perpetuated through current fashion discourses." - Amy Dorie (Fashion, Style & Popular Culture)

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.
Les mer
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
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478015987
Publisert
2022-09-30
Utgiver
Duke University Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
160

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

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.