Why We Can't Have Nice Things

“What are social media users doing when they join in crowdsourced digital outrage against fashion copycatting? Staging an urgent and essential conversation among critical race, intellectual property, digital labor, and global fashion scholars, Minh-Ha T. Pham reveals what is at stake within struggles over fashion creativity and impropriety. She tracks the new ethics of consumer social responsibility and routines of casualized and hyper-visible digital labor that work to reproduce white Western standards of fashion ethics, taste, and intellectual property.” — Roopali Mukherjee, author of The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era

“Minh-Ha T. Pham has written the first definitive sociological account of ‘crowdsourced IP regulation’—that is, the mostly unpaid labor of fashion blogs and social media accounts in policing fashion knockoffs. Pham’s book immerses us in a new world of volunteer regulators scouring the internet for evidence of copying, calling out what they perceive as ‘fake’ (often without regard to whether the copies are illegal or not), and, whether intentionally or otherwise, reinforcing elite luxury brands’ stranglehold on fashion innovation.” — Christopher Sprigman, coauthor of The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation