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

"Pham’s work offers a thorough look at how online behavior is shaping fashion industry actions and sheds light on the ways the current norms are failing some communities while granting protections to others."
  - Sarah Bartlett Schroeder, Library Journal

"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." - Sandra Kurfürst, Journal of Asian Studies

"Will poor taste ever go out of fashion? Find out now. Get yourself a copy of this book today." - Jane M. Ferguson, Sojourn

"Pham’s excellent discussion of social media users’ regulatory actions related to fashion copies is essential reading for those interested in fashion ethics. She challenges prevailing ideas around fashion inspiration and appropriation and provides a background of fashion knockoffs to illustrate how these ideas are based in racist and colonial histories. Her detailed discussion of Asian stereotypes is critical for understanding contemporary bias regarding fashion copies and her case studies demonstrate how these are perpetuated through current fashion discourses." - Amy Dorie, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

"Why We Can’t Have Nice Things is a thought-provoking book that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between social media, fashion ethics, and IP regulation. . . . Pham succeeds in illuminating the racialized hierarchies that underpin the fashion industry and the potential pitfalls of crowdsourced regulation." - Erica Tso, H-Material-Culture, H-Net Reviews