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| That shirt led her to be pulled aside for an interview and picture. She didn't think of it as "Korean" herself, but it turns out she bought it in a bricks and mortar store called L-Seoul. She said she bought it because it was "just pretty." I found this very interesting and indicative of a pattern I was finding as I interviewed more folks there doing what I saw as Korea-influenced things. Photos by Michael Hurt |
By Michael Hurt
As an ethnographer, I'm always thinking about people, the groups they see themselves as part of, and the way they define discrete cultures. As a visual sociologist, I think about our extremely visual culture in which identity and the very important economic acts of consumption that define our place and worth in society are all focused through images and acts of display.
And in this sense, in a modern society in which identity is so largely marked by visual cues and a self that is mediated through visual media ― by seeing and being seen ― fashion as both a marker and means of forming identity should be top priority for sociologists.
But in Korea, ethnography is still the red-headed stepchild of methodology. And I don't mean easy-to-make surveys that you pass out to your other professor friends to make their students fill out, or asking five people who were referred to you to do some interviews to confirm existing suppositions, but really getting one's figurative hands dirty by going out into the street with a few notions of what's going on, bouncing them against reality, honing new notions of what's going on, and then continuing until you have a clearer sense of the field.
Last November, I went to Saigon for a conference and before I left, a couple of Vietnamese students urged me to check out what was happening with Korean street fashion and hallyu there.
They told me something was going on and I had to make sense of it. I trusted my students' judgment, which was partially based on their application of readings and theory from the class on observations made in the street. So I decided to take some historical/cultural context with me, along with fresh, newbie eyes, to Saigon and apply street fashion photography as a sort of methodology to track the influence/flow of Korean style in Vietnam.
In this "Fashion Field Notes" series, I invite readers to look at not only my writing and argument, but at the data itself ― check out the subjects, the pictures and the interviews I did, fresh from the field, with a paid translator and cultural interlocutor. Start with my earlier article, if you please.
I went in knowing pretty much nothing and trusting my informants (translators recommended by my students) to tell me where things were and to point me in the right direction. I did the same this time in Danang.
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This was an interesting observation that I hadn't expected. And it led me to the other CGV theater in Danang, which just so happens to be where coolness lives.
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After tooling around a bit and taking time to tour and ruminate on and observe people in Danang more, I determined that certain cool coffee houses were good places to stake out to look for Koreanness-as-metonym-for-coolness among Danang people.
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In short, it struck me that "Korea" is good as a tool with which to think about or to use as a way to be a cool Asian, about how to aspirationally imagine oneself being cool.
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And I found different levels of knowledge about whether one is consciously doing/channeling Korean things, which actually indicates to me the ubiquitousness of "Korean cool," to use Euny Hong's term. Whether or not a particular subject is consciously thinking about it, Korean modes or items of cool are considered unquestionably cool.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Michael W. Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth, subcultures and street fashion as a research professor at the University of Seoul and also writes on visual sociology and cultural studies at his blog and book development site Deconstructing Korea. His PR/image curation company Iconology Korea also engages in an effort to positively shape images of social others in Korea, construct a positive face for Korea-based or Korea-interested clients, and positive images of Korea in the world. (Instagram @IconologyKorea)
