Ader Error
South Korea
Who are Ader Error? The precise identities of the personnel behind this trailblazing South Korean clothing collective remains unclear. What is perfectly apparent, however, is that over the last four years Ader Error has caught the imagination of young Korean consumers in a way no international brand can match.
Started by a 4-person group of like-minded creative subversives in 2014, the label has since grown into a collective of at least 20. Its raison d’être is to present evidently wearable clothes – which while presented mostly on female models are purchased just as enthusiastically by men – whose obviousness is destabilised by sophisticated kinks both of fabrication and decoration.
The editor who knows most about Ader Error is Monica Kim, US Vogue’s fashion news editor, who reveals that their team includes designers trained at Central Saint Martins in London, the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and ESMOD. The word ‘Ader’, she adds, is an in-English phonetic spelling of the Korean for ‘other’. She says: “Think classic American clothes with a Korean twist. Much of that twist (and perhaps their greatest strength) is the digital satire and cynicism they layer into their clothes, which speaks to the millennial and Gen Z shopper. One of their early successes was a white tube sock with the phrase ‘your life is a joke’ written on it. Brilliant, really.” The Ader Error store in Hongdae, Kim reports, enjoys a level of footfall far exceeding its longer-established luxury neighbours.
The group’s wryly unisex approach affords its young Korean customer base a wearable point of difference in the face of long-entrenched, clothing-signified gender norms. It’s a formula that is finding traction internationally too. Following a 2017 buy at 10 Corso Como, this year the group has presented collaborations with Puma and with Maison Kitsuné, the Franco-Japanese clothing brand and music publisher, and is growing its own-collection sales overseas. It seems poetically apt that a collective whose identities are hidden is thriving via clothing that allows consumers to blur onlookers’ assumptions about their identities, too.