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Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property

Minh-Ha Pham

Duke University School of Law, 2022

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Luxury fashion brands often rely on social media to perpetuate their market power. Media studies professor Minh-Ha T. Pham illustrates how the fashion world’s lack of clarity about intellectual property rights enables luxury brands to create their own online rules, which reinforce their right to copy others’ work. Yet the same rules make luxury brands a moral authority against less-powerful fashion brands that also want to copy others. Pham shows how social media users either help mask – or expose – brands that are prone to theft. Her academic but illuminating treatise concedes that making the fashion industry ethical requires addressing imbalances of creative ownership amid the social media scrum.

Summary

The fashion industry often uses social media to regulate and enforce which companies have the right to copy other companies’ designs.

Top fashion brands have enlisted social media’s cancel culture to regulate certain types of copyrights – mainly to sanction smaller, lesser-known brands that copy elite designers. This often creates the illusion that top brands are adhering to higher ethical standards, given that social opinion has formed around protecting their perceived originality.

For example, the Vancouver knitwear company Granted noticed its designs popping up in low-budget Forever 21 stores. The Canadian company took to social media to identify the “copies” as illegal, cheap and unethical reproductions of quite obviously stolen intellectual property. Within minutes, social media users repeatedly shared and commented on the post. By the next day, the post was getting attention from celebrities and national news channels and radio programs.

Effectively, the internet helped Granted recover any loss of market competition, shamed Forever 21 through boycotting and negative publicity, and boosted Granted’s ...

About the Author

Minh-Ha T. Pham is an associate professor in the Graduate Program of Media Studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property

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Summary

The fashion industry often uses social media to regulate and enforce which companies have the right to copy other companies’ designs.

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