Books
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things:
Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property
Duke University Press (2022)
In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design. In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knock-off fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies.
Download the Introduction chapter here.
!["[S]he not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.'" -- Feminist Media Studies "Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor." -- Journal of Asian Studies "Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a much needed critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them." -- International Journal of Fashion Studies](//custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/243042/254811_33215.png "\"[S]he not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.'\" -- Feminist Media Studies \"Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor.\" -- Journal of Asian Studies \"Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a much needed critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them.\" -- International Journal of Fashion Studies")
Reviews
- Women's Studies Quarterly 46.1-2 (2018)
- QED 4.3 (2017)
- Feminist Studies 43.1 (2017)
- Cinema Journal 56.3 (2017)
- American Quarterly 69.2 (2017)
- Media Industries 4.1 (2017)
- Feminist Media Studies 17.1 (2017)
- Journal of Asian Studies 75.3 (2016)
- International Journal of Fashion Studies 3.2 (2016)
- Interview with Tansy Hoskins (author, Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion)
- Taipei Times (January 21, 2016)
- Imagine Otherwise podcast (January 13, 2016)
- Japan Times, Sunday Books Section (November 29, 2015)
- Brit+Co (October 25, 2015)
Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet:
Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging
This book places the online activities of elite Asian fashion bloggers within a larger history of racialized and gendered fashion labor. While the vast majority of bloggers generate little to no online traffic and no monetary benefits, Asian superbloggers have managed to make a handsome living from taking and posting photographs of themselves wearing clothes on the Internet. Analyzing their online activities as “taste work” practices, this book investigates the kinds of cultural and economic work Asian tastes do, the status and meaning of “Asian taste” in the early twenty-first century, and the fashion public and industry’s appetite for certain kinds of racialized eliteness.
Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet offers a framework for understanding the changing and enduring dynamics of race, gender, and class at a time when we are seeing an economic shift in fashion production towards non-material commodities like blogs as key sites of capital accumulation.
Download the Introduction chapter here.
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"This book proves an invaluable tool for scholars of fashion, consumer, and media studies due to the sophisticated ways it thinks through how value accrues and is disseminated in the digital era but where Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet may have the most profound impact is on the fields of ethnic and labor studies." (Women's Studies Quarterly)
"It is an excellent example of intersectional, feminist digital culture research" (Cinema Journal)
"[S]he not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.'" (Feminist Media Studies)
"Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor." (Journal of Asian Studies)
"Racialization, Pham convincingly demonstrates, is as central to fashion labor hierarchies in the blogosphere as on the factory floor." (Media Industries Journal)
"Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a much needed critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them." (International Journal of Fashion Studies)
Research
Peer-reviewed publications
A World Without Sweatshops: Abolition Not Reform
This essay examines the state, capital, and cultural forces underpinning global fashion supply chains and sweatshops, in particular. It goes on to argue that radical women of color feminism (as opposed to "free market" feminism) provides the best means for dismantling rather than just reforming global fashion's extractive structures.
To Slow Down Death
A personal essay reflecting on life and love under colonialism and COVID. It's part of a cluster of essays published in a special issue called "Sociality At The End of the World."
Copynorms
This essay takes fashion copynorms (social media produced and shared norms about the difference between fashion creativity and copying) as a case study for analyzing big data. As I discuss, fashion copynorms constitute a dynamic big data archive of contemporary consumer culture and attitudes that tell us a lot about the social conditions and uncertainties structuring big data environments.
"How to Make a Mask": Quarantine Feminism and Global Supply Chains
The essay considers what the rise of at-home mask masking and industrial mask production in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic tell us about how global supply chains are a racial project.
"China Through the Looking Glass": Race, Property, and the Possessive Investment in White Feelings
This is a critical review of the Costume Institute's China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition in 2015. Specifically, I consider the exhibition's display of cultural inspiration and what the curator calls its "romantic Orientalism" as racialized feelings that have material value and power. How they're vested with this value and power and what effects such "a possessive investment in white feelings" produce are the subjects of this essay.
Racial Plagiarism and Fashion
This essay charts a path out of the stultifying binary oppositions of "cultural appropriation" and "cultural appreciation" with regard to fashion and beauty forms and practices. It suggests that "racial plagiarism" is a more precise description of the kinds of copying that happen in fashion and beauty contexts. As an analytic framework, "racial plagiarism" attends to the non-illegal but not unproblematic status of this kind of unauthorized copying; explicitly connects "racial plagiarism" with other forms of racial and economic exclusions that are also not illegal but not unproblematic; and demonstrates how non-legal constructions of authorship and copying produce racialized assumptions about creativity and criminality.
Feeling Appropriately: On Fashion Copyright Talk and Copynorms
Fashion doesn't qualify for copyright protection but a set of copynorms based on socially accepted racial constructions of authorship, originality, private property, and public resource define and differentiate between creativity and criminality. This essay begins with a historical perspective of fashion copynorms. It then examines one case study — a dispute between Feral Childe (a small ecoconscious design firm) and Forever 21 — to demonstrate how cultural frameworks and values about fashion copying are informed by and contribute to racial biases and blind spots.
Visualizing ‘the Misfit’: Virtual Fitting Rooms and the Politics of Technology
This essay investigates the cultural and technological logics underpinning the design and operations of virtual fitting rooms. Analyzing the scientific discourse and methods engineers and researchers employ to establish “the perfect fit” or the optimal “relation between the individual body and the particular garment”, this essay argues that the scientization of style at once establishes and obscures the racial profiling ideologies underlying fashion and style judgments. In this way, this latest fashion consumption technology is fundamentally linked to the expansion of surveillance culture in the US.
“I click and post and breathe, waiting for others to see what I see”: On #FeministSelfies, Outfit Photos, and Networked Vanity
This solicited essay appears in a special issue dedicated to fashion blogs. It draws on the #feministselfie hashtag campaign that emerged on Twitter in November 2013 and the visual activism project promoting immigration reform called RAISE Our Story to insist on a more historically and politically nuanced understanding of the politics and practices of self-composure or "networked vanity".
Archival Intimacies: Participatory Media and the Fashion Histories of US Women of Color
This solicited essay appears in a special issue dedicated to fashion curation. It discusses the critical and curatorial aims, materials, and methods that underpin a digital fashion archive devoted to the histories of US women of color called OF ANOTHER FASHION.
Listening as a Labor of Love: Commerce, Community, and Little Saigon Radio
This essay urges for a shift from the site/sight-specific approaches to race, ethnicity, and nationalism to aural approaches that take into account structures of sound and regimes of listening as modes of diasporic community formation. A close examination of one popular southern California Vietnamese language radio station’s uniquely ad-based programming demonstrates how aural systems and practices produce a Vietnamese American imagined community of radio listeners and consumer citizens.
Paul Poiret’s Magical Techno-Oriental Fashions (1911): Race, Clothing, and Virtuality in the Machine Age
This essay draws on Paul Poiret’s Orientalist fashions and fancy-dress party as a case study for exploring the relations of race, aesthetics, and technology particularly as they cohere around techno-Orientalism. As early as the 1910s, as this essay shows, racial discourses have functioned virtually and virtual bodies have been constituted through racial logics.
‘Susie Bubble Is a Sign of the Times’: The Embodiment of Success in the Web 2.0 Economy
This essay critically considers the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining arguably the most recognizable personal style blogger in the world British Chinese blogger Susanna Lau (a.k.a Susie Bubble) as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, it is concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notions of success and the ideal subject it produces. Lau’s personal success, this essay reveals, is reflective of emerging global patterns born out of the rising significance of Asians and young women (especially young Asian women) as consumers and producers in the digital economy.
A Success Worse Than Failure
This short essay is part of the Editor's Forum feature in the Journal of Asian American Studies. In this issue, the editor asked scholars to respond to the question, "Has Asian American Studies Failed?" This essay suggests that discussions of failure reach beyond "evaluation" for a more speculative and suggestive inquiry that considers Asian Americans’ historically fraught relationship to “failure” and “success.”
Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body
This essay turns to several Asian American and British Asian fashion blogs as unexpected sites in which popular myths about digital democratization and disembodiment are being challenged. How some personal style blogs deploy a radical politics of sentimentality that reembodies fashion and labor histories with the material realities of race, gender, sex, and class typically invisible in (but nonetheless constitutive of) the fantasies fashion tells is discussed here.
*This was the Number 1 most-read Camera Obscura article from May 2011 to December 2013.*
The Right to Fashion in the Age of Terrorism
This essay examines the relationship between the U.S. war on terror (targeting persons whose sartorial choices are described as terrorist‐looking and oppressive) and the right‐to‐fashion discourse (promoting fashion consumption as a civil liberty). Looking at these multiple invocations of the democratization of fashion, this essay shows how the right‐to‐fashion discourse colludes with the war on terror by fabricating a neoliberal consumer‐citizen whose right to fashion reasserts U.S. exceptionalism and its principles of private property, social mobility, and individualism.
The Asian Invasion (of Multiculturalism) in Hollywood
This essay traces the links between national and transnational representations of multiculturalism in Hollywood. It focuses on the representation of Asian bodies in two popular films, Rush Hour (1998), a conventionally produced Hollywood film set in post-riot Los Angeles, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a transnationally produced film set in nineteenth-century mythical China.
The essay has been anthologized in various film studies books.
Public Writing
Articles written for a general audience
As Fashion Lines Are Praised for Making Face Masks, Don’t Ignore Garment Workers
Fashion brands are offering to make face masks to fight Covid-19. But who are actually making the masks and under what conditions? This article focuses on the sweatshop conditions underlying fashion brand face mask production.
How to Fix the Fashion Industry's Racism
An essay about the flaws and failures of corporate diversity in general and in the fashion industry in particular.
Stories the Fashion Media Won’t Tell
An article about the fashion media's failure to cover a historic workers' strike and what it tells us about the limits of the "ethical fashion" movement.
De Blasio’s Plan for NYC Schools Isn’t Anti-Asian. It’s Anti-Racist.
New York Times, Op-Ed (June 13, 2018)
An op-ed about making New York City's best public high schools actually public.
The High Cost of High Fashion
An essay on the racial and classist assumptions about "fast fashion."
Fashion Shopping While Chinese
A solicited essay on racial profiling and the fashion pirate in fashion media.
Race as a Sartorial Construct
The Funambulist, Issue 3 (2016)
A solicited essay on racially inclusive fashion design. How does a collection like Rupert Sanderson's luxury line of "Asian high heels" imagine the "Asian foot"?
Spinoza in a T-Shirt
An article, written with Léopold Lambert, on the politics of bodies and design in and across fashion and architecture. What would design look like if we didn't design for a normative body?
Fashion’s Cultural Appropriation Debate: Pointless
An article outlining an "inappropriate" approach to thinking and talking about cultural appropriation.
** Republished as “Pour un discours inaproprié d’appropriation culturelle” in a special issue on Decoloniality in the French sociology journal, Revue Tumultes 48 (May 2017),
‘Diversity’ in Fashion Will Never Be Enough
An article calling on the industry to move away from the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion to institute real practices of equity.
Digital Runways, Paper Dolls
A solicited article on the Burberry Prorsum Autumn/Winter 2011 Hologram Runway Show in Beijing, China. Why are virtual runways as white as real runways – especially when Asians are the target consumers?
Pose This Way: What Blogger Kinesthetics Say About Global Fashion
A solicited essay on how popular fashion blogger poses reflect shifting ideas about power, knowledge, and expertise under informational capitalism.
Couture’s Chinese Culture Shock
An article commissioned by American Prospect investigates the persistence of racism against Chinese consumers at a time when they're becoming a key global luxury market.
What’s in a Name? Urban Outfitters and the Navajo Nation’s Trademarks
An article commissioned by American Prospect that draws on the Navajo nation's legal actions against Urban Outfitters to discuss the legal and cultural implications of trademark policies and practices .
If the Clothes Fit
A commissioned essay and cover feature story on fashion as a feminist practice.
Republished in Susan Shaw and Janet Lee's Women's Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 6th edition.
Digital Projects
In July 2010, I began collecting fashion objects that are generally left out of traditional museum displays, library archives, and fashion scholarship. As of this writing, more than 250 photographs (many contributed by private individuals) and as many personal fashion histories are accessible online in what I’ve described as an alternative archive of the not-quite-hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of U.S. women of color. In 2012, Of Another Fashion was included in WorldCat, the world’s largest library catalog. In 2014, a special issue devoted to fashion curation in the academic journal Fashion, Style & Popular Culture published an article I wrote about the curatorial and critical implications of the archive.
The images and stories that are represented offer an oppositional memory of not only fashion and style but also an opposing viewpoint of the lived experiences of U.S. women of color with respect to fashion. The women of color represented in Of Another Fashion have lives and interests, desires and experiences that go beyond any easy identifications. The histories collected in Of Another Fashion illustrate in vivid terms and intimate detail that women of color—both those whose families have been in the U.S. for generations and those who arrived as immigrants—have long participated in U.S. fashion culture in a myriad of complex ways.
At the end of 2014, Of Another Fashion has more than 206,000 subscribers. It has been featured on NPR's The Picture Show, Colorlines, Hyphen magazine, and was named one of The Roots' "Best Tumblrs to Follow" (2012).
Threadbared (co-authored with Mimi Nguyen, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is a widely respected research blog on the politics, aesthetics, histories, theories, cultures and subcultures that go by the names “fashion” and “beauty.” While the blog is now inactive, it remains viewable. Many of the posts have also been syndicated to media sites including Alternet, Racialicious, and Jezebel.
About
Minh-Ha T. Pham is Professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. For the past decade, her research has been focused on women and ethnic labor under global and digital capitalism, particularly as they relate to the transnational fashion industry and its complex maze of supply chains. She's the author of two books: Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging (2015) and, most recently, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (2022). Both books are published by Duke University Press. Her research has also been published in academic and mainstream outlets such as The New Republic, The Nation, New York Times, Social Text, American Quarterly, Jacobin, and The Atlantic.
Her research has been featured in, among other sites, The New York Times, Vogue, The Guardian, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and Huffington Post. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
She lives in Brooklyn with her son.
Education
Minh-Ha received a BA in English at University of California, Santa Barbara (1995) and earned a PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Visual Studies at University of California, Berkeley (2007).
!["[S]he not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.'" -- Feminist Media Studies "Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor." -- Journal of Asian Studies "Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a much needed critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them." -- International Journal of Fashion Studies](http://custom-images.strikinglycdn.com/res/hrscywv4p/image/upload/c_limit,fl_lossy,h_1440,w_720,f_auto,q_auto/243042/254811_33215.png "\"[S]he not only makes her argument, she demonstrates a model of digital analysis that is both traditional and novel at the same time. After reading this book, it will be hard to argue against the merits of 'blog studies.'\" -- Feminist Media Studies \"Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor.\" -- Journal of Asian Studies \"Pham's book is sharp, punchy and eminently readable. It is full of shrewd visual and textual analysis of the content of blogs and puts forward a much needed critique of the kinds of critiques that bloggers themselves tend to have launched at them.\" -- International Journal of Fashion Studies")
