The luxury brand Balenciaga stole a cultural product, a two-dollar rainbow-colored Thai-origin sampheng bag, and sold it for over couple thousand each. This stirred Thai netizens to make a joke out of the interesting situation via hashtags to poke fun at how their beloved potato-sack-errand-tote turned high fashion. Deservedly, hashtag actions thwarted a reversal of attention from Balenciaga to Thai citizens. The rainbow bag debut showed who gained benefits of an apparent cultural product while protected from labels like being a fashion copycat.
If Balenciaga got away with theft, then the Asian community does not. The Asian copycat stereotype exists and is rooted from a long cultural and political labor history. Asia has a huge influence in the consumer and e-commerce global markets, yet are stigmatized to creating cheap, fake, or third world products. However, Western brands continue to use Asian garment factories to produce products. In the end, the credit is bestowed to the West with innovation while the other is othered and stigmatized such as being labeled cheap Asians. The global fashion market space is territorialized as a Western capitalist cultural production where racial subjects are excluded from normative conceptions.
Also, stealing a cultural design or product is not new in the global fashion market. Retail giant Forever 21 stole a sweater design from a brand called Granted Clothing (now Granted), however, the original sweater design are Cowichan sweaters of Vancouver Island. Another example would be the Mixe blouse originally worn by Tlahuitoltepec people (part of the Mixe group indigenous to Oaxaca, Mexico) that became popular during the mid-2000s seen in big retail brands as well as luxury brand Isabel Marant. Even big-name Target steals from a local queer artist Felix D’Eon’s pride flag on a Mexican Loteria game card art piece. This book further explores how social media and users work as IP work and regulation in fashion.
Netizens and social media have an involuntary yet direct role in intellectual property policing within the global fashion market. For example, a social media handle called Diet Prada calls out all types of fashion copycats in a meme-like manner through comparison photos with a punchy line. The handle amassed a large following from its accessible yet investigative approach to fashion knockoffs, design theft, and plagiarism. “Inspiration” and “appreciation” as to “knocking off” or “stealing” operates to deflect criticism away from fashion elites to nonelites. Digital vigilantism is one way the global fashion market is regulated through consumer behavior in social media and Diet Prada critiquing fashion elites is isolated from the matrices of racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism that structures global fashion.
This book reframes regulation, intellectual property, and copyright practices in the global fashion market by introducing the Fashion Originators’ Guild of America (FOGA) and their past shady practices. For one example, FOGA used the media to perpetrate consumer guilt and was the first to “social media shame.” During the Depression of the 1930s, buying more expensive and original items as to budget copies was portrayed as civil and ethical instilled through media, news, articles, and op-eds by the leading class. In turn, there were reinforced codes of behavior, image, and belonging, which was largely unattainable to those generally identifying as an immigrant, poor, and working. Thus, budget buying was seen as low-class, unrespectable, or even moral failure. This is the history that affirms the racial and class hierarchies that still govern global fashion today. What was intended to make the global fashion market more ethical also reinforces Western property logic and struggles of inclusion.
So how can consumers become ethical shoppers in fashion? In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property, Minh-Ha T. Pham reveals the answer is complicated since the global fashion market and industry is both ethnocentric and colonialist, rooted by capitalist structure. Minh-Ha T. Pham holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute. She consistently engages in projects and publishing related to topics in the intersection of gender, race, and labor under global and digital capitalism. Her first book, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, researches the growing and leading platform of an elite class of Asian fashion bloggers from the mid 2000s to the 2010s.
