What Visual Ethnography can do for Legal Research on Fashion and Culture?

See SS14 Chanel multi coloured brush stroke dress [left] | SS14 Robe motif arc-en-ciel manches courtes from sheinside [right]

I’ve been thinking about the types of research methods I am employing for a cultural analysis of law across the field of fashion and more acutely what those research methods mean for lawyers, students and other academics engaged in socio-legal research. Visual ethnography is one of my research methods I am using for my PhD research, not least because I like pretty things, but because it sits outside the box, of the many research methods, that academics in the legal field commonly draw upon and is rarely ever used in legal research, despite the many ways, especially IP law, engages with the aesthetic, signs, symbols and the world of images. Legal Scholar Rebecca Tushnet highlights in her essay: Worth a thousand words, the law outside the text this inconsistency; she posits that:  “Law, like most other disciplines or practices that aspire to rationality, has tended to identify that rationality (and hence its virtue) with texts rather than pictures, with reading words rather than ‘reading’ pictures, to the point that it is often thought that thinking in words is the only kind of thinking there is.”  I think as lawyers, academics and students in the field, visual studies can help us observe, discover and identify more acutely the (illegal) cultural practice(s) of copying which effectively is what copyright law seeks to regulate. Using the tools we have at are disposal is a much more effective way to open up and engage in more fruitful conversations about the future of intellectual property policies for culture in the creative economy.