Why Korean street fashion is important
I’m not a fashion guy. I’m not a fashionable guy. I’m not really into fashion. But I do find Korean street fashion endlessly, academically fascinating. I always have, since stumbling into its direction through my photography around late 2006. Nowadays, I teach using my experience in the actual fashion field, as the first street fashion photographer in Korea, having shot street fashion seriously and continuously, in the actual streets with actual real, random subjects (no preset models), from 2006 until the present day. I’ve been shooting street fashion portraits at Seoul Fashion Week from 2007 until now. But it wasn’t for the fashion, per se. I also use my photographs as social data, since my field of specialization is in visual sociology. When I have taught visual sociology at both Korea and Yonsei Universities in the past, I have always utilized street fashion as a case study and even sent my students to do photographs and ethnographic interviews with “paepi” (Korean portmanteau for “fashion people” in English) at Seoul Fashion Week.
Looking at fashion is a fascinating thing to do academically and intellectually, especially since so much social communication is going on through clothing-as-cultural-texts. And if you want to listen to and watch this conversation as a sociologist, it can tell you a lot about what’s going on in society. You can also use the case of Korean fashion to study the truly unique, twice-a-year fashion industry event known as Seoul Fashion Week, which has become a cultural institution for street fashion folks and a new kind of socially unusual, un-Korean space of social openness and liberal sartorial norms, which itself was enabled by the housing of the event in, around, and at the “alien” DDP structure sitting in the middle of Dongdaemun since 2012.
Urban studies people might call the study of the paepi congregating at DDP and how their culture is related to physical space and structures “human geography.” Because the DDP is interesting not just because of the architecture alone, it is also interesting how the building defines an alien space for social aliens.
In this way, street fashion in Korea isn’t interesting just because of the clothes. (Since I’ll refer to “street fashion” as just “fashion” from now on, stick with me.) Fashion in Korea isn’t inherently interesting. Trends change but pretty much stay the same. Debating about what’s coming next season or what particular trend is cool or not is like debating about whether or not you’re a good person because you do or don’t like the color royal blue, or whether you like French or Russian caviar. It’s pointless.
But what is awesome about Korean street fashion culture isn’t the amazing styling, although you can like it for that if you want to; it isn’t the sub-cultural aspects, because there aren’t any, really. The Korean paepi do not really constitute a counterculture, or really any signifi- cant sub-cultural values different from the mainstream. Instead, the paepi are fascinating as a new class of Korean super-consumers, as a group of youth who have found a way to gain social validation quickly and efficiently as super-consumers who have transformed what Marx called a “commodity fetish” (Warenfetischismus) into a creative endeavor. They flipped a failing of capitalism into a veritable art form. They turned consumption into creation.
And that’s what any sociologist worth his or her salt should be making an extra special priority to be researching in Korea right now. What surprises me (although not really, given what I know about the state of the field here) is that I know of not a single Korean sociologist looking at the burgeoning street fashion culture and scene in Korea. Not. A. Single. One. That’s one reason I do what I do, in addition to simply thinking that street fashion is one of the most authentic and viably international forms of hallyu culture today and one of the most interesting markers of social change in Korea.