The Intergalactic Power of Korean Fashion
Nowadays, it's easy to be on the “Korea is cool” bandwagon. But it hasn't always been easy or cool to assert that Korea is cool. Because they used to call you crazy for that. But, we said this from way back in February, 2009, in the first book about Korean fashion, The Seoul Fashion Report:
“Now, with the support of the Seoul Metropolitan Government (the mayor made a point of attending a show as the city renewed its support for Korean design associations and the promotion of Korean fashion abroad), it is easy to imagine Seoul being mentioned along with Tokyo, Milan, Paris, and New York within a few years, and for people around the world to be as concerned with what everyday Koreans are wearing as much as the clothes that top Korean designers are producing. When all this convergence happens, it will surely be called a “Korean fashion wave,” as people from all over the world start taking real notice of what people are and aren’t wearing in Seoul and perhaps even other cities.”
— The Seoul Fashion Report, p. 5
Let’s go back in time and sink into some historical context around calling a “Coming Korean Fashion Wave.” First off, Korean fashion industry people said I was crazy for thinking Korean fashion was anything special, because Korean fashion was just derivative copying of the Americans (If you were American gyopo) or the Japanese (if you were a Korean national). And the only thing worth looking at in Asia was Harajuku, Harajuku, Harajuku, and “Haven’t you heard of Shibuya?” and it was all Japan, Japan, Japan. Because, I was told, the disaffected Japanese kids filling the pages of FRUiTS Magazine were “truly creative” products of a subculture, unlike the Korean kids who just slavishly followed trends, like lemmings eagerly diving off cliff faces.
Where I experienced the most resistance regarding Korea as a place of worthy fashion culture was from Koreans, in Korea. This should come as no surprise since there was no one more skeptical of Korea’s pop culture validity than Koreans themselves, especially in 2006, when I started documenting Korean Seoul fashion culture, and in 2007, when I started doing so at Seoul Fashion Week. This was at a time after a slew of failed Rain concerts followed by lawsuits (and the rumors that the ticket numbers were either exaggerated or outright faked), combined with the Korean media reporting on the Wonder Girls groundbreaking North American tour and taking that continent by storm (despite essentially, no one having heard of them). So, there was a lot of suspicion amongst Koreans that the “K-POP phenomenon” was partially a piece of propaganda hoo-hah designed to make the nationalist project look good. And they weren’t wrong.
The other big pic energy at the time was that of sa-dae-ju-ui (사대주의), which is a cultural “background radiation” of cultural “deference to greater power” that has permeated everything in Korean culture. In its initial form, this was the centuries-long attitude that all things worth knowing and doing came from China, even to the point that late Joseon scholars refused to accept and take the hangul alphabet seriously.
Real arts and letters — real high culture — were done in Chinese, with Chinese characters. And this attitude of (or one could even say, an “orientation” towards) extreme cultural deference would continue just before and during (and yeah, a bit after) the Japanese occupation of Korea, and then in long form with the US control of (South) Korea.
But in around 2006, there was the stubborn and strong idea that Korean cultural things were inferior in the same way that everyone knew Goldstar products broke after 2–3 uses, and that “Made in Korea” meant “buyer beware.” It is what I call the “Curse of Goldstar” that made that company rebrand itself several times after the 80s, to the point that after so many leaps away from the initial (1958) Goldstar branding, it became “Lucky-Goldstar” after a corporate merger before becoming “LG” in 1995.
Brand Korea had little value in the world, and hence also, in the minds of most Koreans. Things outside Korea had value because they were outside Korea. They were not here. And if you think about who the most famous Koreans were, well before anyone had ever heard of a “K-anything” that wasn’t derogatory (well, before it had actually been “kimchi” that was the prefix denoting what you were denigrating, e.g. “kimchi-car”) most Koreans who became über-famous inside Korea had done so precisely because they had gotten recognition outside Korea (really, meaning the “White West,” and specifically, this means the USA or western Europe).
Take the Korean legendary artist PAIK Nam-June, or fashion designer André KIM, who turned down Michael Jackson when He asked him to become his personal designer. Two clear, pre-hallyu examples. But, then if you take the obverse, other side of the coin, they also help prove the point. Margaret Cho, the first Asian American (and Korean American, and by Korean logic, the first Korean) to get her own sitcom on American television, was killing it in American culture in the early 90s.
Cho was everywhere, even getting a theatrical release of her standup show back before that was common (only people like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy or occasional other men could pull that off before), and here was a Korean American woman pulling all this off, and Korean media never invited her over, never mentioned her. And at a time when you could hear Korean audiences audibly react when a Samsung product was visible in a Hollywood movie scene, this was unusual. With as many Firsts, Tops, and #1s as Cho was pulling off at the time, she should’ve become Number One Mamma Jamma Super-Korean. But she was completely ignored, as she was too hard to fit into easy, ideological use in Korea; she was too fat, too loud, too queer to bequeath too much social power back home. Even the strong pull of sadaejuui couldn’t put that kind of queer peg into the right ideological hole. She had to be ignored. It actually makes complete sense.
But sadaejuui is the energy field that powers the intense national pride that lifts Korean spirits into the stratosphere like when BONG Joon Ho won four Oscars for Parasite in 2020, in a moment that was suddenly Korea getting a Best four times in a single go, which meant Korea had the Most on a night of Firsts. But sadaejuui also powers nara-mangshin, or “national destruction” or more organically translated, “national disgrace.” Now, at the time, Margaret Cho would've caused nara-mangshin, which is interesting because she would've been embarrassing for Koreans in Korea, despite being lauded in the west. But despite this seeming contradiction for the notion of sadaejuui, it just goes to show that Korean homophobia, misogyny, racism, and lookism are a bitch. Literally.
But that was before the tectonic shift in hallyu belief that happened with “Gangnam Style” that primed the Korean Wave for much of the post-2012 decade, and then the Squid Game Revolu(a)tion that locked it in. But sadaejuui has been there the whole time, nevertheless. The ubiquitous popularity of“Gangnam Style” was initially met with the skepticism and disbelief that it was to be expected, but, like a juggernaut, consistently and effortlessly burst through every barrier to belief by knocking over a non-Korean, objective standard and watershed, again and again and again. Broke YouTube? CHECK. Danced with Britney Spears on Ellen? Well, guess you can’t fake THAT. CHECK. PSY on Good Morning America? That happened. CHECK. And then HAMMER? Double-CHECK.
Now, you have to remember, PSY was not The One. He had had some irksome scandals. But he was always a bit too much. Many people were not rooting for him. But the power of international recognition was just too great; it was irrepressible. It could not be denied. Everything all previous Korean culture industry projects had tried to do, he had done. He had PWNed them all.
After that was BTS. Then the United Nations speech. Then Billboard. Then COVID and more time to take in Korean content. Then Squid Game. And then we were done with the idea that the popularity of Korean stuff might be a put-on, or an allusion, or some kind of elaborate scam. That was done.
But sadaejuui in Korea doesn't just go away. It endures and adapts, and soon this system learns to try and makes sense of its cognitive dissonance by isolating, the K-pop phenomenon, as some kind of grand exception or alternatively defining Hallyu itself quite narrowly, in fields that are more comfortable and easy to understand, such as music, cinema, and even things like gaming or comics. For some reason, there is no easy belief around the Korean Wave when it comes to fashion, and this is partially related to the fact that there are no easy and concrete markers of success in fashion and style that Korea can easily understand.
It is also partially related to the idea that fashion and style and clothing is generally considered to be a womanly concern, which is why the gargantuan K-Beauty industry got almost completely ignored by scholars for far too long, even as far too much, easy oxygen was given to K-POP in scholarly research journals, despite the fact that the impetus for writing, most of these articles was mostly fodder to stoke the fires of national pride and endlessly marvel at the impressive numbers and metrics that K-pop’s success could provide. (This was true, despite the fact that K-beauty actually was posting some pretty significant and noteworthy numbers, didn't mean that a lot of folks thought this worthy of their attention).
In the end, what makes Korean fashion interesting within the general field of so-called Hallyu is the fact that it's actually the one case of culture industry or a popular culture success that isn't arguably due to top-down investment. In fact, it's most interesting as a case of pop culture field success, despite other failure of investment. One could look at it as an accidentally huge ROI situation, but it would be hard to find any causal links between governmental funding and fashion field successes, especially since the influence and power of Korean fashion/style aesthetics is as diffuse as it is difficult to define through any concrete metrics. There are no Fashion Oscars™ for Korean fashion to win, and you can’t track the vectors of trends with Likes or Follows. The problem with looking at the power of a set of aesthetics such as found in Korean style is that it’s hard to prove influence to people who only value numbers. Anyone I speak to under the age of 25 outside of Korea takes the importance and influence of Korean fashion and style as a given, as a Known Fact. It’s all the Old Guys who cross their arms and won’t entertain any evidence that Korean fashion is a Thing. That is, unless it shows up in a K-POP video and a white person from France or New York starts talking about it.
Or, ahem, even if fashion journalism in theWhite West starts phoning about Korean Fashion News consistently each and every season for several years, social scientists and academics and just about every kind of journalist is quite difficult to convince that Korean fashion is indeed is noteworthy as the other fields. The main reason seems to be there aren't any bright and shiny objects to focus their attention upon, nor are there heavy sparkly statues to point at, either.
But that doesn't mean there isn't hope! Just like in particle physics, in describing the forces of the universe, it's the apparently weakest force that is not only the least obvious, but also the most powerful in defining the way the universe works. It’s not the Strong or Weak nuclear forces, or even the Electromagnetic Force that runs things in the universe. It’s the slow-burn but farthest-influencing Gravitational force that dominates, which creates the largest, interconnected structures in the universe, extending beyond planetary and solar systems, but is that which defines galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and the nearly unfathomable scales of galactic superclusters, which span thousands of millions of light-years across.
In short, their power isn't directly felt at the macro levels, but it is the most broadly expressed in the universe at larger, intergalactic scales. Those in the know already know this. I guess we'll just have to wait for the slower on our planet to finally catch up to where we've been for a while.
