퇴폐미: The Beauty of the Dirty, Decayed, and Decadent
Twe-pe-mi (most closely pronounced “tway pay me”) is a Korean word for an aesthetic that celebrates the beauty in “bad” things. It is not a Korea-specific aesthetic in that it exists in other places and cultures, but its concrete expression as a serious Sino-Korean word (頹廢美) displays the special place the idea holds in contemporary Korean aesthetics especially in Korean photography and Instagram. The Nineties in the United States was full of twe•pe•mi as the “grunge” idea in indie music or the “heroin chic” trope in high fashion as found in examples such as the infamous Calvin Klein campaigns showing emaciated models and implications of a “chic” heroin addiction.
But in the present, Korean form twe•pe•mi denotes “something that is opposed to moral or customary practice in a negative way” and generally refers to things too sordid, saucy, and/or sexy for polite society. In pictures hashtagged with this term today, it often refers to something as simple as a subject illuminated with red, blue, or otherwise indigo lights, often with smoky eyeshadow or an open top that shows cleavage. or it refers to things that are downright sexy, but usually in a “dark” or “fallen” way.
