Korean Fashion

“I think they’re confused,” says the blogger Hong Sukwoo as he slowly drinks his strawberry juice with a straw in the ornate Las Vegas-meets-grandma marble lobby of Seoul’s Imperial Palace Hotel. Sukwoo is talking about Korea’s younger generation, the K-pop kids now in their late teens and early 20s who have plenty of disposable cash and a burning desire to be unique, but who barely have a clue who they are. Sukwoo, at the ripe age of 28, already considers himself part of an earlier “not so beautiful, but perhaps more thoughtful” generation. For the past four years, he has been filling his Your Boyhood blog (yourboyhood.com) with the photos he takes of Seoul’s jeunesse dorée and essays that read like sad, disjointed poems (at least when you try to decipher them with your computer’s instant translator). For him the blog is still in the early stages of a project he imagines will take him about 10 more years: to record the passing youth of one of Asia’s — and the world’s — speediest fast-track cultures. “Young Koreans haven’t found their own style yet, so they’re copying images they find on the Internet,” he says. “It’s a form of stylish cosplay.”

Sensing my lack of comprehension, he quickly summons the Wikipedia definition on his iPod Touch: “Cosplay is a kind of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Any entity, real or virtual, may serve as the subject including inanimate objects, and gender switching is common.” Says Sukwoo: “Young Koreans understand taste, but what they’re wearing isn’t really them.”

This explains a lot about Seoul fashion week’s fall/winter 2010-11 edition, which featured a parade of boys in lipstick, baby-faced thugs, Russian toy soldiers, escort girls stumbling down the runway in glittering sleep masks, mountain climbers in three-piece banker’s suits, party princesses sporting diamond-studded teddy jackets and cartoon sweaters and “I Dream of Jeanie” pants, the homeless simultaneously wearing everything for present and future use on their backs, chic young Navajo professionals, Asian hillbillies acting out toilet jokes in fringed leggings and hoodies with animal ears, enough zippers to change one piece into five different looks, and an army of trench coats that made the Seoul runways last week seem like one big open casting for a fashionable remake of “Casablanca.”

Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency
Tae-Young Ko
In an obvious nod to cosplay, Tae-Young Ko, the designer behind the label beyond closet, took models in the prime of youth for his show and gently aged them 30 years with baggy cardigans and gray streaked hair to show what he’d ideally like to look like when he is 60. Ko, 30, designs T-shirts with clever graphics, but young customers also come to him for his moderately priced tailored pieces. The low prices convinced Richard Chun of Idiel, which handles the United States sales for many affordable Korean brands in New York, to take on beyond closet; the line is now available at the trendy Brooklyn retailer Oak, where you can also find Korea’s hip, more-for-less handbag line Gear3 by Saen.

Speaking of handbags, at Seoul’s Dongdaemun night market (the name refers to its all-night operating hours) it is possible to find versions of any luxury brand bag you crave for about 130 euros. Needless to say, the place is usually packed. Meanwhile, I had Boon the Shop, one of Seoul’s hottest stores, all to myself on my Monday afternoon visit. A giant pearl necklace sculpture dangled to the ground from the atrium four floors above me, and the best spring items from Dries Van Noten and pieces from Guillaume Henry’s first collection for Carven were spread out before me like a winning poker hand.

Courtesy Seoul Fashion Week
Johnny Hates Jazz
Just down the hill, in the 10th-floor glass box above the two-year-old Korean branch of her 10 Corso Como shop, Carla Sozzani was holding a press tour of the opening of an exhibition of Guy Bourdin’s films curated by Shelly Verthime and Nicolle Meyer, his longtime model. The store and 10CC cafe, where Seoul’s elite come to nibble tea cakes and eyeball each other, is a co-production with Lee Seo-Hyun, the vice president of Cheil, the fashion arm of the Korean giant Samsung. Sozzani says she makes four or five trips a year here to percolate the store’s mix — Tom Binns baubles, the Olive Oyl-shaped Alaïa dresses she wears and, soon to arrive, limited editions from Seoul’s hottest young women’s labels, Johnny Hates Jazz and Jain Song.

Jain Song was the last show of the day in Seoul on Wednesday. And while there were a few more shows scheduled for Thursday afternoon, Song’s felt like the grand finale. Song is a second-generation designer; her mother, Dong-Soon Kim, who designs for her own well- established women’s brand Wooltimo, showed earlier on the same day. The show was held refreshingly off-site, away from the SETEC, a dingy concrete block convention center on the outskirts of town that is the week’s official venue, on the ground floor of Fashion Company F&F’s sleek headquarters in Gangnamgu. This was the 70th show on the calendar since Friday, and I had seen a little over half of them. Song stood out like a flawless pearl with the first look: a long camel skirt split provocatively up the front with a gaucho yoke and a white blouse with a collar like a neck scarf blowing in a light breeze. Everything that followed was similarly sleek, mysterious and provocative with plenty of abstract takes on that Seoul obsession, the trench, looking suddenly very womanly.

Johnny Hates Jazz, Ji-Hyung Choi’s collection is for young women whose idea of office attire is a tailored off-the-shoulder bustier dress and a T-shirt. Which doesn’t seem so far-fetched when you see the gaggles of girlfriends who line up demurely to see the hourly, and sometimes half-hourly, shows. Many of them could pass for the fifth member of South Korea’s latest girl group sensation, 2NE1 (“to anyone” or “twenty-one”). Dressed in cartoon T-shirts, pink, sparkles, lace, metallic leggings with girlie shorts and anything by Jeremy Scott, they scream in ecstasy at the arrival of each K-pop heartthrob headed for a tour of the front row.

And Jeremy Scott himself danced through Seoul over the weekend and managed to squeeze in a shoot for Nylon magazine before the Saturday night Jeremy Scott Adidas Originals party with 2NE1 at Answer in Cheongdam, where he filled in for the group’s fourth member, the 16- year-old rapper Gong Min-Ji, a k a Minzy. Scott’s explanatory Tweet soon followed: “PS MINZY COULDN’T COME CUZ THE PARTY WAS AT A NIGHTCLUB & SHES UNDERAGE & IS A GOOD GIRL WHO WOULDNT WANT TO SET A BAD EXAMPLE 4 HER FANS!”

2NE1 have taken off since their first song “Lollipop” made its debut in an ad for a Korean mobile phone brand just a year ago. In early March, they were the big winners at Seoul’s Cyworld Digital Music Awards, bagging four prizes including 2009’s best-selling artist. (The awards go to the top background songs played on Cyworld, the South Korean popular social networking service.)

Once you get past the bright-colored girlie girls, what really stands out in Seoul is the chic, bordering on the obsessively refined, look of the Korean young men, from college kids and young professionals in their early 20s to men in their 40s. There were scores of these perfectly tailored, trench-coated, sartorial-with-a-twist specimens milling around during the first two days of Seoul fashion week, which were reserved for men’s wear. What doesn’t add up is how very different they look from their kittenish counterparts. It’s like two separate style tribes have suddenly arrived for a game of seduction based on radically opposing looks. If there is a couple that exemplifies this, it’s France’s Bernard Henri Levi in black and white hand-tailored Charvet and his wife, the ageless Arielle Dombasle in bright Crazy Horse showgirl gear masquerading as clothes.

I don’t think MVIO’s designer, Han Sang-Hyuk, was thinking about chic French philosophers like Levi when he put together his latest collection, but his aim is to make men look and feel fine and he’s upping his game every season since becoming the Cheil/Samsung men’s brands creative director. This season he took mountaineering garb — parkas, striped climbing cords and hiking boots — and paired it with high-end tailoring. (Note to all you young Korean executives: you need to get out more.)

Juun J. is another popular Korean men’s-wear designer; his trench coats, ponchos and multiple zipper tailoring have been copied all over Seoul and are available in New York at 7. His small sizes are routinely snatched up by women, and he is thinking about adding a women’s collection. I asked him what he thinks about young Seoul’s style division of the sexes. “There needs to be a revolutionary generation of women’s designers to come out and lead women into something new,” he said sounding not at all confused. “Designers in their early 20s are still learning, and they’re the ones who will do it.”