K-pop dreams for Korean runways
Amid conflicts in the peninsula, designers show they got Seoul
We Koreans are very fashion conscious. The young designers have grown up in that environment and they know how to interpret street fashion into their design DNA.
Ju Tae Jin
Paris: With insults being traded daily between Washington and Pyongyang, Koreans could be forgiven for feeling they are on the edge of a geo-political volcano these days.
Yet South Korea could not be more hip, with political tension on the peninsula doing nothing to dull the international success of South Korean K-pop singers who rule the charts in Asia and beyond.
The country has also become a style destination for thousands Chinese youth eager to copy the looks of their K-pop idols, with top luxury brands like Dior and Chanel competing to clothe them.
With the country’s cosmetics industry also booming, their fashion houses are now dreaming big.
Young K-fashion designers hope to cash in on the style-icon status of K-pop stars to compete with Japanese labels, which have long been Asian fashion’s big hitters.
Unlike Japan, where brands such as Comme des Garcons, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto are global names, few Korean labels have made an impact beyond their shores.
This weekend the government brought five rising talents to show at Paris Fashion Week as part of its “K-Fashion Project” charm offensive that has already made stops in New York, Beijing and Shanghai.
“We Koreans are very fashion conscious,” Ju Tae Jin of the Korea Research Institute for Fashion Industry said in France.
“The young designers have grown up in that environment and they know how to interpret street fashion into their design DNA. They are very dynamic and are good at social media,” she said.
Ju said that Korean designers were particularly gifted at streetwear, with Seoul giving Tokyo a run for its money in terms of youth style.
“I wonder what the fashion people here will think of the collection,” said Kathleen Kye, whose designs have been worn by K-pop star G-Dragon.
A graduate of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins, she launched her own label Kye in 2011, and is one of the better known names in the Seoul Fashion week.
The five brands are also having their clothes featured at the Colette store in Paris, a fashionista temple.
Kye’s highly coloured streetwear collection was inspired by superstitions and fortune-telling – both popular Korean obsessions.
Eunae Cho has a different thing brewing in her collection Tibaeg ( “teabag” in Englsh) – with tea-leaf prints and green as her main colour.
Using light-as-a-feather glittery organzas and flower embroidery, she rethought the long flowing traditional Korean hanbok dress, as well as sending some rather dramatic pleated pants done the catwalk.
Sporting a French beret, tattoos and sunglasses, Bumsuk Choi the creator behind the General Idea label, cuts a very different figure.
He left school at 17 “because I needed to make money” and learned to sew in a factory.
He has a clean distinctive style and likes to link the millennial generation with the hippies of the 1960s – jokingly calling them the “phono sapiens” because of how they live through their phones. — AFP