Fashion Field Notes from Saigon
A NEW METHODOLOGY — TRACKING KOREAN STYLE AS A CULTURAL MARKER
I recently went to Ho Chi Minh City (neé Saigon) for a conference and decided to take a methodological leap and use the idea of identity performance (refer to my prior “Girl Life Is a Drag” column) as a marker to track lines of cultural influence. The idea here was to look for places and people reproducing Korean styles as a way of tracking Korean pop culture influence. tracking Korea’s pop culture influence isn’t a new idea, since the existence of Vietnamese (or American, French, or Japanese) watchers of Korean music videos is nearly automatically taken by many scholars of and commentators on the putative Korean wave as evideence of some kind of regard for Korean culture. After all, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” breaking Youtube must be a sign that Korea has made it, no? But this approach is so one-directional and misses a lot of the nuance inherent to most situations in life. I decided to look at the influence of Korean pop culture as it is expressed through more discursive (two-way/obviously interactive) practices). Dresssing up as Korean people is something that much more inherently implies a regard for Korean style as a desireable mode of living, of being.
In this way, the performance of Koreanness through street fashion was like that blue imaging dye one has to drink before going into the MRI machine. You know what it is and how it goes in, so you use special methods to see where it comes out. You can thereby make out the shape of things you’re interested in. Since all of my several informants tell me that Koreanness itself is associated with a kind of cool, Asian cosmopolitianism, it was interesting to identify and track Korean spaces and people that marked themselves as Korean.
THE “GIRL”
First, this approach understands the “GIRL” as a socially constructed ideal and character, as well as a formation of capital and focus/locus point of market interests (see Driscoll below), a means of ideological control (see Yeran Kim below), and in its specific Korean form, a trackable locus and focus point to track across borders, especially when considering the developmental eagerness that may explain why Vietnam, a nominally Communist country that has wholeheartedly embraced neoliberal market ideology, has taken a great cultural liking to Korean cultural products and ways of being cosmopolitanally Asian (Korean).
THE KOREAN “GIRL”
The “girl” in late modernity is a specific formation of cultural industry capitalism. The Korean girl, as she is commodified and performed in very specific ways, is both a product and marker of korean culture industry flow, which many refer to as “hallyu.” The appearance of certain specific trends as social practices, along with certain specific formations, is something quite worthy of tracking.
“THE NEW PLAYGROUND”
I was surprised to be taken to a new youth fashion complex call The New Playground, which struck me as soon as I went in as a retail space exactly like the “private-branded hive” (PBH) retail structures in Dongdaemun that were actually invented here in Korea, as clothing outlets that resemble department stores (lately and only superficially) but are actually vertically-integrated production complexes that unite sweatshop-style production (and illegal reproduction) into a single structure. (See Kim et al below) Which is why you can buy a SUPREME sweatshirt for 25,000 won and not $200 in say Migliore (Korea’s first PBH), APM, or Doota (which has put up a more upscale veneer in recent years). In fact, it was the supercharged, fast-fashion industrial power of Dongdaemun that drove and enabled all the fashion craziness and creativity of 1990s Harajuku and Shibuya in Japan. (see Azuma below) Indeed, the Japanese schoolgirl stood at the center of Japanese popular culture in the 1990s (see Kawamura below), but all her sartorial (and sexual) craziness would not have been possible without Korea’s textile industry enabling her. The existence of this very Korean social space surprised me, and I was even more surprised (but yet, not) to find Korean identity-dignifying people there.
In sum, what does it all mean? What did I learn? First of all, I went into Saigon hoping to find some examples of Korean cultural influence as expressed through Korean street fashion-as-cosmopolitanism and found no strong examples of what I was looking for at all on the streets of Saigon I had easy access to as an outsider. However, when my intrepid assistants took me to what I was told was the most hip and fashionable place in the city, it turned out to be the most obviously Korean space I had seen thus far, and filled with many individuals who were acting out Koreanness through their clothing and styles. They had also seemingly made a clear and obvious link between cosmopolitanism and Koreanness, as employees working in clothing stores that functioned in a literal Korean mode; but interestingly, they hadn’t made this link consciously, yet were still caught up in acting out Koreanness as part of being cool and cosmopolitan.
While not a conclusive finding nor one made from a broader sampling of places at the edges of hallyu, bit is an interesting and intriguing start. I’ll end this piece with the music video of the very K-pop-style V-pop star who introduced the “finger hearts” to Vietnam. See what this tells you about the influence of K-pop and Korean style as cosmopolitanism itself for Vietnamese people.
CREDITS AND THANKS
MANY THANKS go out to assistant/fixers
JENNY TRAN and CHARLES DUONG
AND
THUHA NGUYEN
AILENE NGUYEN
who both helped refer assistants Jenny and Charles. Without your help, none of this work could have been done!
KEY WORKS TO LOOK INTO:
Azuma, N. Pronto moda Tokyo-style — emergence of collection-free street fashion in Tokyo and the Seoul-Tokyo Fashion Connection. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management.
Byun, S.-E., & Sternquist, B. (2011). Fast Fashion and In-Store Hoarding: The Drivers, Moderator, and Consequences. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal.
Driscoll, C. (2002). Girls : feminine adolescence in popular culture and cultural theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kawamura, Y. (2006). Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion. Current Sociology.
Kim, S., & Kincade, D. H. Evolution of a New Retail Institution Type: Case Study in South Korea and China. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal.
Kim, Y. (2011). Idol republic: the global emergence of girl industries and the commercialization of girl bodies. Journal of Gender Studies, 20(4), 333–345. doi:10.1080/09589236.2011.617604
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 currently explores gender and fashion at The Girl Act (Instagram @girlact_official) and also writes on Visual Sociology and Cultural Studies at Deconstructing Korea.
