1 - “To whom does it belong?” Conflicting Practices in Creative Labor and Ownership in Vietnam's Creative Economy

The rise of the eco-fashion movement and the state’s agenda of creative economy in Vietnam over the past decade has precipitated a proliferation of collaborations between fashion designers and ethnic minority textile artisans, in which designers adopt the materials and techniques of ethnic minority artisans into new designs and aesthetics. While these partnerships have been touted as a productive strategy to preserve cultural traditions in contemporary life through market mechanisms, there has also been friction between the ways designers and artisans think about creative labor and ownership, as the dominant conceptualization of creativity as individual property sometimes comes into conflict with the indigenous practice of collective creation. Many designers frown upon artisans’ replicating their pattern designs, while the latter, accustomed to sharing patterns among each other, see little problem with adopting new patterns for their own agenda.

This paper examines these conflicting understandings of creative ownership and how they shape designer-artisan collaborations within Vietnam’s contemporary creative economy. Drawing on media discourse and ethnographic data, I argue that the dominant individualist conceptualization of creativity labor and ownership has resulted in an unequal playground between artisans and designers, prompting them to undertaken different strategies to negotiate for agency and benefit. Creativity and innovation have become popular buzzwords in the past decades as a desirable individual quality and morality of economic actors, reflecting an ever-stronger neoliberal logic in Vietnam’s socialist-oriented market economy. Therefore, questions regarding which forms of creativity are recognized as valid and by whom remain important issues to be explored.