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| Model Jo Lee (Instagram @jolandh) broadens the aesthetic range of Korean tradition as he sports Joseon-era gentleman's attire on the Seoul Fashion Week street "runway," in what is surely a nod to the runaway Netflix hit "KINGDOM." Photo by Michael Hurt |
By Michael Hurt
The most recent Seoul Fashion Week was a staging ground for diversity and diverse projects. I've been crowing about the way the unique space of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) has offered itself for all sorts of social activities, including the independent and organic formation of the largest fashion runway at Seoul Fashion Week, and it's comprised of everyday folks, not industry insiders.
Ever since Seoul Fashion Week inaugurated the DDP space in October 2012, it has become a stage where various pockets of cultural diversity and hybridity in Korean culture come to network, show off and present their projects. Various agendas are in motion, from Instagram models trying to get free, well-shot pictures to gain more followers, to models trying to get discovered, and designers clothing said models in their brands to gain more visibility.
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| A fashion-industry mom preps her daughter for the camera at Seoul Fashion Week, which has also become a stage for "kids fashion" stars. Photo by Michael Hurt |
A variety of projects can be mounted in the "metonymic landscape" of the DDP, in which the structure allows the merging of social actions and mixtures of uses that would not be possible in traditional single-use-oriented structures in which an auditorium is an auditorium, a lobby a lobby, or a food court is just a food court. In the DDP, the slanted path from street level to (below) ground level is an entrance, a lobby, a runway and a stage. It invites diverse social uses and diverse projects.
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| Model April Song (Instagram @april_ssong2) poses in an ao dai from designer LA PHAM in the front of the DDP for the SaigonxSeoul project, in which Korean and Vietnamese models wear the other country's traditional dress in their own country's metonymically/symbolically important environments. Photo by Michael Hurt |
And within this unique space for social mixture, the "metonymic landscape" that is the DDP, the Seoul Fashion Week event has become an attractor for those possessed of a great deal of social alterity and creatively different ideas; in other words, those who think (and exist) outside the box.
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| This stylish young woman (Instagram @hanna_jun_) decided to mix possibly dowdy pearls with a fresh Adidas hoodie to create an unexpected, new synthesis. Photo by Michael Hurt |
Seoul Fashion Week and its participants also constitute a refreshing departure from the top-down commercial machinations of the big-culture industry style of, say, something like K-pop, which has become so fraught by its own contradiction and corruption that it has started to implode as Korean society evolves and becomes more progressive.
The street fashion culture that drives so-called "K-fashion" is very much the result of this progressive, liberalizing shift in Korean culture and politics, especially as it is driven by social media and increased connection to the world outside Korea. In this sense, the closer one looks at K-fashion, the more interesting detail one sees, unlike K-pop, in which the closer one gets, the worse the view becomes.
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| These two Japanese women (Instagram @fuufuu4u and @raanpisy0104) at Seoul Fashion Week in Korean high school uniforms said their image of Korean high school girls as a metonym for all things cool Korean came from dramas and films and that they had simply wanted to look "pretty" by wearing them. Photo by Michael Hurt |
In short, the Seoul Fashion Week event is unique as a fashion week in terms of its pointedly public nature as an event that receives a great deal of public funding, with everyone from high school kids and aspiring Instagram models able to buy tickets to all the shows, a unique venue that innovatively allows for the staging of all kinds of otherwise untenable social interactions, all within a country that now embraces the socially new and unusual. It is one of the most interesting cultural events Korea and truly a perfect storm of elements that have made the previously socially impossible quite normal.
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| The largest single fashion "runway" at Seoul Fashion Week, which has flipped street fashion formal outsiders into informal insiders and attracted the attention of the international fashion industry. Photo by Michael Hurt |
*The intern team that made all the photo work possible, in alphabetical order: Hoang Minh Chau, Madison Davis, Jae Eun Kang, Yoojeong Lee, Kimberly Opipari, ThuHa Nguyen, Keena Wilson, Nitzah Vasquez
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)
