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

Why We Can't Have Nice Things examines the very timely issue of crowdsourced intellectual property (IP) regulations. Minh-Ha T. Pham studies intellectual property regulations in the context of “everyday social media activities that emerge around issues of fashion creativity and copying” (3). In fact, creativity and copying form the two binary poles of the threshold against which users of social media as well as fashion conglomerates decide whether a fashion item is inspired by X or whether it is considered a copycat. The evaluation of a fashion product as being inspired by clearly is appreciative of the fashion designer's creativity. Reading a fashion item as a copycat and fake, by contrast, calls for the sanctioning of the item's producers. Within the fashion industry, the book particularly focuses on the exclusive realm of haute couture.Pham identifies social media users’ activities of liking, sharing, and commenting on social media content about fashion fakes as “extralegal work.” “Extralegal work” means that the users actually lack the legal expertise on intellectual property to decide whether a fashion item legally is a copycat or not. Accordingly, the social media users’ power is first of all a discursive power that might lead to legal actions or to voluntary actions by the fashion industry. Through their actions social media users create and circulate a “common sense of legality about fashion design, property, and impropriety” (5), which in turn influences both corporate and consumer behavior. As a result, through crowdsourcing, social media users are able to shape discourses and to initiate legal actions. Pham particularly regards this power as a strength that assists in regulating the fashion market. Yet, as always is the case when cherishing the power of social media, there is also a downside to it. In her fine-grained analysis, Pham shows that the fashion ethics that inform the social media users’ evaluation are based on Western notions of property rights, which simultaneously violate non-Western fashion norms.Accordingly, the reproduction and circulation of racialized stereotypes about Asians, as well as their presumed underdeveloped tastes in fashion, constitute the central concerns of this book. Pham bluntly shows how on a global scale, fashion copies are commonly assumed to come from Asia. She also interrogates the racialized and classed as well as gendered notions of copycats underlying the geopolitical power dynamics of the fashion industry. Fashion, from its beginning, has been imbricated with class politics. In the introduction, Pham discusses fashion's turn from cheap chic for anyone to investment/sustainable fashion as a rhetorical shift rather than an ideological one. Once again, this development illuminates the domination of Western industries and property norms over fashion ethics. A recurrent trope in the book is the racialization and othering of, in particular, Asian fashion producers and consumers through IP regulations. Pham details the ideological work that IP regulation does, identifying it as “a racial and white feminist project of differentiation and socioeconomic boundary maintenance” (55). The monitoring and policing of fashion copies in and through social media reproduce racist and colonial norms about what constitutes a copy, and/or the assumed opposite of copying, creativity.In the first chapter, Pham traces the history of the policing of antipiracy efforts in the United States dating back to the 1930s. With the outsourcing of these policing efforts to social media, she points to the continuity of racialized and colonial norms inherent in the differentiation between fashion knockoffs and authentic fashion. In chapter 2, she examines the stereotype of the so-called Asian copycat, foregrounding the racialization of Asianness and its association with copying in Western cultural imaginaries. She also advances a critique of capitalism in this chapter, but it is not made explicit, at least not in the sense of examining the power dynamics determining the international division of labor. Associating labels “made in Bangladesh” or “Made in Vietnam” with “cheap labor” is, in fact, the result of globalization and increasing deregulation, ultimately reproducing colonial structures of the exploitation of labor and resources.The case study of Balenciaga's copying of the Thai Sampeng bag, in chapter 3, turns this history of othering upside down. The “crowdsourced regulation from below” (79) by Thai social media users actually challenges the corporate-driven international IP regulation regime. As a further example of this kind of counterhegemonic regulatory work, she examines the Instagram account “Diet Prada” in chapter 4. The hosts of “Diet Prada” counter the racial extractivism of the fashion industry by revealing cases of copying designs for which no IP regulation has been in place. Thereby Diet Prada channels money and appreciation back to those who created a design in the first place, who too often come from underrepresented and marginalized groups.Pham discusses Asia more broadly with regards to stereotypes of Asianness and the racialization of Asian fashion designers and consumers. However, in chapters 3 and 4, Pham refers more particularly to Southeast Asia. In these two chapters, she investigates the aforementioned case of counter hegemonic power initiated by Thai social media users. Additionally, she inquires into the hierarchical and yet relational relationship between “model goods” and “mimic goods” in Vietnamese language and culture. With her investigation into the symbolic universe of branded versus mimic goods, she invites readers to think beyond the binary poles of “authenticity” and “copy” that inform Western notions of IP regulations.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.