Designer seeks to change wedding culture
Many grooms- or brides-to-be dream of a small yet meaningful wedding.
Paradoxically, this translates to squandering money and monotonous weddings, formulated by existing wedding businesses in Korea.
Lee Kyoung-jae, a 37-year-old designer, has sought to shift the formulaic trend since 2006 with her wedding planning startup “Sewing for the Soil.”
Her motto is making weddings eco-friendly, she says, meaning they have to involve less consumption and minimum waste.
“Rather than showing off a special day in a materialistic way, the focus is more on the meaning and less consumption, it’s a wedding we design intentionally,” Lee told The Korea Times in a recent interview.
A wedding prepared by Sewing for the Soil is held at a private place or a town hall. Lee designs a wedding dress and a suit made of natural and renewable fiber and even reforms the garments after the event so they become casual clothes for daily life.
A wedding bouquet is not a one-off throwaway item either. Lee arranges flowers with their roots attached so they can be planted in the soil or in a pot after the wedding.
Any cloth or decorative flowers used in the event are given to guests. They are turned into eco bags and little plants.
The process of wedding preparation takes about three to four months, or even up to six months, Lee said, during which she reflects the groom and bride’s thoughts and ideas in the program, garments, and decoration.
“It takes time as this wedding is organized from scratch, different from a common one where a wedding planner only provides only ready-made choices,” she said.
With the trend of “small wedding” spreading, the number of her clients has increased substantially in the past few years.
“When starting the business, I planned weddings of two to three couples a year. In early 2010, it jumped to 20 to 30, and this year, it is expected to be 80 couples,” she said.
Top star Lee Hyo-ri’s wedding in 2013 was also Lee’s work. Its unusually simple and humble style caught public attention and became an inspiration for many young people.
Lee said she can feel that the influence of celebrities’ small weddings helped people change their perspective on the event.
Lee recalls herself having a thirst for meaning in life. Though she landed a stable job as a clothes designer at local broadcaster SBS after graduating, she could not bear the routine, no different than any other office worker.
After quitting the job at 25, she pursued her dream again by studying at Kookmin Graduate School of Design. The school teaching eco-centric design inspired her to make a garment of PLA, a plastic substitute made from fermented corn starch.
She later expanded her interest to wedding gowns. Her disappointment with flashy weddings of top TV stars pushed her to enter the field, she said.
She had a fashion show with PLA wedding gowns in 2005. One soon-to-be-bride contacted Lee after the show, saying she would like to wear it in her wedding. That was the start of her business.
Lee’s business ideas keep evolving. She is now pioneering a new style of wedding, the so-called “village wedding.”
It is a way of benefiting the economy of the village you live in, by having people from your neighborhood prepare your wedding — one or two chefs prepare wedding food; women who had to quit their careers when raising children decorate and manage the ceremony; and a neighborhood hairdresser does your hair.
“I’d like to challenge Gangnam-centric wedding culture,” she said, referring to weddings in Korea centering on businesses in the rich area of southern Seoul.
Lee said the project is now exclusively ongoing in Seongbuk-gu, northern Seoul, but she dreams of expanding it to all of Seoul, and even to other cities.
“I will be happy to see people have more choices in weddings and share meaning with others.”