Tesco
Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Book

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

Read or listen offline

  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Controversial
  • Concrete Examples
  • For Experts

Recommendation

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.

Take-Aways

  • The fashion industry often uses social media to regulate and enforce which companies have the right to copy other companies’ designs.
  • Historically, elite fashion brands wrote the rules of ethical, creative ownership for their own benefit.
  • The fashion industry’s enforcement of certain intellectual property rights appears biased against Asian designers.

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. 

Comment on this summary or Iniciar a Discussão