No abstract

In this paper I outline some of the hazards vintage sellers experience, and the pressure they face, while selling online via Instagram. I argue that the conditions of precarity, overwork, and burnout common to these informal and self-made enterprises were magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, governments around the world began to implement policies to mitigate and manage the outbreak. Significant research efforts were deployed to track and analyse these policies in real-time to better inform the response. While much of the policy analysis focused narrowly on social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of disease, here, we present a dataset focused on capturing the breadth of policy types implemented by jurisdictions globally across the whole-of-government. COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) includes nearly 50,000 policy measures from 150 countries, 124 intermediate areas, and 235 local areas between January 2020 and June 2022. With up to 40 structured and unstructured characteristics encoded per policy, as well as the original source and policy text, this dataset provides a uniquely broad capture of the governance strategies for pandemic response, serving as a critical data source for future work in legal epidemiology and political science.

In this themed section, we consider the ways that Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders impacted, and continue to impact, small retailers that sell niche goods like vinyl records, vintage clothing, and handcrafted items in urban areas within the United States. Now more than ever -as storefront businesses have had to shift their inventories exclusively online -sellers' homes and small shops act as warehouses and staging areas for photographing, packing, and shipping merchandise. Members of what we term the digital vintage economy, many of whom are women, navigate additional domestic and reproductive workloads at the same time they engage in new forms of home-based selling labor. Platform labor builds on a long history of inequalities and exploitation related to racial capitalism, and even if some consumer experiences can return to "normal" after shelterin-place orders end and the vaccine is distributed, many labor practices forged during this period will likely continue on as before. In many respects, the forms of labor described in these essays began before the pandemic and will continue to have reverberations in a post-Covid context.

In this article I focus on the fashion industry’s relationship to vintage garments as design inspiration and product prototype. I analyse how appropriation of vintage is rationalized in standard industry practice and how ethical boundaries are drawn and maintained between ‘appropriation’ and ‘inspiration’ in the creative process. When talking with designers the discussion of inspiration and appropriation quickly becomes a personal and subjective discussion about the integrity of the design process and labour. So any discussion of creativity and industry practices has a responsibility to address the rank and file workers who bring artistic visions to life. Interns and employees in the industry were expected to knock-off other designs and designers while their own creativity was stifled and/or exploited. The central contradiction that emerges from this research is how an industry known for its creativity and ingenuity – notably an industry that polices copyright infringements around the world – routinely engages in practices of forgery that weaken both its claims to authorship and the lucrative status of designer-as-artistic-genius. I contend it is crucial to explore these issues through the situated and local everyday practices in the fashion industry in order to understand how these contradictions are navigated and even made profitable.