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

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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.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B8VM7ZKJ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Duke University Press Books
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 8, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 8.5 MB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 169 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1478023210
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #2,113,752 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #874 in Commercial Fashion #1,797 in Fashion Design #1,936 in Communication & Media Studies
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