The Reformation of Korean Tradition: The “Gae-ryang Hanbok”
“Tradition” in Korea is a commodity. And like any commodity, it can be bought and sold. It can be remixed and altered. It can also be left alone. Additionally, it can also be repurposed, misused, and even “upgraded.” And there is no stronger, purer, and unapologetically, nationalistically boastful cultural object-symbol in Korean culture than the hanbok, Korea’s traditional dress. I would venture the generalization that most Koreans have some strong feelings, some way, about the hanbok. The hanbok — esepcially the female version — simply is Korea — no ifs, ands, buts, or further qualifications needed.
Since the goal of this piece isn’t a historical survey of all the gendered Tradition as found in all the promotional campaigns in Korean modern history, I’ll suffice it to say that with a couple representative visual examples, a student of Korean society should pretty much know what I’m talking about. And I’ll also suffice it to say that the general Korean public’s thinking about the representation of gender in the service of ideological or other kinds of promotion has become a bit more allergic to the outright conflation of Korean women in hanbok to Tradition itself.
Which is not to say it can’t be done tastefully, nor well.
But I think it safe to argue that the association between the woman-in-a-hanbok and vaunted Korean Tradition is a pretty well worn trope. And a well-established bit of visual grammar in a cultural language everyone knows how to speak here. Which is one reason I’ve been working to take the hanbok as a socio-visual element and put it in a new context to see what comes out the other end. Some of my readers might already be familiar with my earlier hanbok photo essays (#1 and #2 are linked here) in which I put hanboks on very differently raced bodies.
My whole goal here is to play with the hanbok as a semiotic, symbolic element that is usually quite stubbornly fixed in a certain kind of ideological/promotional context. It’s either promoting the greatness of the nation, the fineness of Korean culture, or both. And often along with other things, such as the “Please, PLEASE visit Korea!” plea campaigns of the 1990s or the “Korea is the best place in Asia — skip Japan” messages of the early 2000s. The hanbok is rarely just there in the picture without a big, government-vetted and approved reason. But my goals here are not so grandiose as those in the commercially helpful grand narrative of national tourism campaigns. Mine is simply to wrest the hanbok away from its usual clichéd contexts and put it into its most actually appropriate ones.
And now’s the time. The hanbok is undergoing a couple kinds of renaissances. The first is the unfortunate renaissance that comes with a huge increase in tourists and the authorities’ encouragement of tourists wearing hanbok while touring popular tourist sites such as palaces and other Traditional places. As several Korean hanbok designers have been eager to tell me, those are not hanbok. If the idea is to have people wear traditional, historically accurate-by-any-stretch-of-the-imagination Korean hanbok, and tourists tderive pleasure in their apparent and putative authenticity, then they should at least actually, accurately be hanbok. But alas, they are not.
The beef every single hanbok designer I have ever talked to about this has to do with the fact that if you’re going to introduce tourists to the fineries of Korean traditional culture, then they should at least be the thing it is purported to be. So if it is a hanbok — Korean traditional dress — it should at least have elements that are either Korean or traditional. After all, that’s not too much to ask.
These designers tend to know that the hanbok is not a dead, static object, frozen in time, for display only in the museum of the Traditional mind. It is alive and keeping up with the times, even as it maintains elements of Tradition, such as the telltale single-ribbon bows on the sides or proper materials. All the designers I’ve talked with express great disdain with the selling out of the hanbok for a quick buck with the idea “Who cares? Neither the dumb tourists nor the clueless young Koreans these days would even know the difference.” And those shady hanbok rental operators are right, unfortunately. And laughing all the way to the bank. And hanbok designers, along with those who actually care about the beauty of actual hanbok, lament the linked facts that not only is the hanbok as Traditional object being distorted (the word choice in just about every conversation I’ve had with them about this), but the tourists who are paying for an authentic experience — what tourism studies calls “existential authenticity” and is why we marvel at actual items famous people have possessed or touched, or the structure of Namdaemun Gate, which is technically a replica but occupies the actual spacethe real thing was, like a perfect avatar that becomes the original. In this sense, the tourists are being robbed, their trust being violated. Who wants to come all the way to Korea, rent supposedly authentic Korean things from Koreans to tour Korean places, then find out they were walking around in idiotic clothes, and treated like idiots. This makes most hanbok designers very angry. It’s the downside of the recent upsurge in hanbok wearing in contemporary Korea.
But the second part of the hanbok renaissance in Korea has to do with a younger generation of wearers and designers putting them back on and reinterpreting/retasking them to contemporary needs and style demands. Most of the angry designers I spoke to are elated to see the revival of interest in the hanbok, especially in its incarnation as the “gae-ryang hanbok” or “reformed/upgraded” hanbok. The Chinese character and Sino-Korean word root gae would best be translated as “reform” or “improve” and is found in many common Korean word-concepts such as gae-hyeok (“(the) Reformation”), gae-myeong (“the (Korean) Enlightenment”) or in a general sense like tax reform. It is a word root that is generally part of making a thing a better thing, usually by modern upgrades. The ryang part, however, is also interesting. It is best translated as “good” or “virtuous”, so it is easy to see why it’s an apropos name for a thing people are generally seeing positively — in the sense of the Reformation with a capital R, the “reformed hanbok” is a pretty good handle. It’s an interesting choice, actually, since I could have easily imagined the name for this newer take on the hanbok simply ending up “modern hanbok” or “hyeondae hanbok”, which would simply fall into an old vs. new or “modern vs. old-fashioned” , essentially negative regard where Korean sentiments on “old” or “outdated” things tend to be concerned.
What I believe the gaeryang hanbok to be actually doing in the culture is provide a model of how to re-do or re-engage with tradition in a way that actually works in a decidedly tougher street fashion market and vastly different consumer culture’s relationship with gender and identity. As it can be done uninterestingly.
Another word for contemporary takes on the hanbok is “saenghwal hanbok” or “lifestyle hanbok” Unfortunately, this implies that the hanbok itself is actually not for everyday life, while this special version is. It’s a fairly accurate observation but again, I can see why hanbok enthusiasts themselves seem to use “gaeryang hanbok” more. It doesn’t separate the hanbok away from society nor imply that its wearing is unusual. Gaeryang reflects the way many younger Koreans find to be the proper mode of engagement with Tradition.
Credits
EDITORIAL MODELS (in order of appearance):
Sodany SOY — Instagram@so.dany
Kelly Diakité — Instagram @kellydiaks
JEONG Jihye — Instagram @geejiiii
HANBOK DESIGNER (in order of appearance):
Heo Sarang (허사랑 한복) Hanbok — Instagram@heo_sarang
ASSISTANCE AND MAKEUP (for Sodany)
JEONG Soo-ah
