I know this site tends to often center on testosterone-laden discussions of social issues, North-South relations, and Korean politics, but sometimes a change of pace can be refreshing. For those of you into this sort of thing, you might want to know that Seoul Fashion Week is on in full force this week, all the way through Monday.
For those of you who’ve been here a long time, you might have noticed that Korean fashion has quietly advanced leaps and bounds ahead of what it was even just 4-5 years ago, with the biggest overall improvement being with men’s fashion, in my opinion. Still, in general, there’s a lot more verve and creativity across the gender line.
My site and our writers are busy covering Seoul Fashion Week, which sports some really cool shows with Korea’s most famous and up-and-coming designers, star-studded audiences, and attendees who are themselves mostly designers, models, or at least some pretty serious fashionistas. Although many of us non-metrosexuals may not have thought of rocking a fashion show, it’s more fun than you think; you’re surrounded by glitterati, you get free stuff, and the music is rocking.
In any case, the show’s going on down at the convention center at Hakneoul Station (down at the bottom of the #3 line), from where you just follow all the people up. They’re all going to the fashion show. You can also get more information from the English-language section of the official site. With the price of admission, anyone can rub shoulders with VIP’s. Or at least people trying to look like one.
Yes, this is a shameless plug, but we take pride in our original content, which we put great effort into making, it’s an event worth letting you know about, and hey — it’s probably one of the flyest evenings out you can have, in Korea or otherwise. Even if you don’t get down to the show, check out our ongoing coverage at FeetManSeoul.com. And if you do come, maybe we’ll see you there!
31 Comments
For those of you who’ve been here a long time, you might have noticed that Korean fashion has quietly advanced leaps and bounds ahead of what it was even just 4-5 years ago, with the biggest overall improvement being with men’s fashion, in my opinion.
i hope hes not talking about the guy in that picture as an improvement to mens fashion!!!!!
Is that a guy? Well you could have fooled me!
Korea is still waaaaaaaay behind the curve in Asian fashion. Any major Japanese city, Taipei as well as Hong Kong have much more fashionable citizens on full display.
But I do agree that Korea is slowly improving its ‘look.’ They just need to work on more originality in their designs instead of copying the latest euro or Japanese trend.
Sadly, the guy in that picture is an improvement to Korean men’s fashion.
Am I the only one who remembers when every Korean guy had a “sports cut”? I’m not saying that all men’s fashion has improved; I’m just saying that now there’s more choice of badness. (And, some good stuff, too.)
The guy looks okay from the waist up, but those huge, rolled-up cuffs make his legs look even shorter.
Bah!
Men don’t have to care about fashion. That’s one of the benefits of being men. Shame on guys who waste our great advantage.
Re: the bottom pic…….
The hanbok is to fashion what a turd is to lunch meat.
The fashion world doesn’t give a shit about clothing “inspired by” traditional Korean garments.
Also, Korean men’s fashions are looking more queer everyday.
An observation:
The Genesis of the “K-Murse”
a) Honey your handbag looks heavy, let me carry it.
b) Please let me carry your handbag.
c) Oh the hell with it… I’ll just buy my own damn handbag !
e) Hmmmm… does this handbag go with these shoes ?
Then there is the K-Men’s makeup revolution… But I’d better get into that or some K-Guy is going to hit me with his purse.
All I can say is thanks for the never ending laughs guys… Keep it up.
A bunch of dudes talking about the fashion sense of some other dude. We’re doing it wrong.
The girls in the pictures are cute.
Anyone remember when “men in black” were all you saw, no matter what the occasion?
Nice strong, bone-crushing thighs on that top one. Could probably crack a walnut in there.
korean chics are fashionable
i give them that
I’m still waiting for them to overhaul the event for being too boring, and make it a bit sexier, and call it the New Seoul Fashion Week. Will you put up the N.S.F.W. photos, too, Marmot?
Does anyone remember manpurses back in the ’90s? They were everywhere. That and white socks with three letters on them, and plaid suits. Of course, now you have blindingly shiny suits with cheesy exterior stitching.
Anyway, enough of that. Surely there were better looking chicas at the above event, no?
…now if they can only get out of the 80’s look. Yeah, some of the 80’s came back, but with a twist. Their style is REAL 80’s.
Blech.
I agree with the disdain of most of the posters here. I was in (provincial) Fukuoka last week and in terms of fashion and sheer style, the average chick downtown handing out advert tissue packs and not even really trying knocked the socks off the girls in the above pics.
I am a big fan of the current “Gothic Lolita” look in Japan. There is even a magazine for them called “Gothic Lolita Bible” that is just hilarious.
Michael, there is a magazine of funky street fashion in Japan called “Fruits” that has been doing what you’re doing for at least the last 5 or 6 years. Check it out. It’ll be a real eye-opener for you.
Maybe it is the lighting or the material, but the guy in the red sweater looks like he just peed his pants…
What’s funny to me is I’ve seen a few of you guys in person.
I wouldn’t talk shit about any of the people pictured if I were you all.
Carry on, as I know you will.
There’s such a Korea-bashing virus here. Most Korean women are very attractive, and dress attractively. Come here to Canada, and you’ll find masculine-looking women with short boring haircuts, strange piercings and ugly tattoos, not to mention clothing ridiculously and unsuccessfully squeezing their oversized flabby girths. I like the classic sense of beauty that Korean women usually exhibit. Good thing I married one!
Yes, in our house we have an entire room that we call “the closet”. I dress out of one drawer in that room, while Mrs. Linkd drives herself bats rooting through endless drawers, racks and shelves to get herself armored for each new day of corporate warfare.
It’s good to be a man.
ExpatJane wins! Just close the thread down now; nobody’s gonna top that.
i have been to japan 5 times from sapporo, kummamoto, okinawa, tokyo among other places and your average korean girls are a lot hotter than the average japanese in my opinion
#16 — Thanks, KB, but I bought that book when it came out in 2001, and think his work is great.
However, he’s actually not doing what I’m doing, since he was working in Japan, which is a completely different country and fashion culture. Perhaps if I were trying to track a specific, performative fashion culture, I’d go to cosplay events or check out the decora kids, but since this is Korea — not Japan — and that specific kind of street culture doesn’t exist here; so, by definition, what I’m doing has nothing to do with his project.
But to the extent that I am indeed taking pictures of people on the street and publishing them, yes, we’re doing the “same” thing. But my photography and style are as different from Aoki’s FRUITS as his is from Scott Schuman’s work as “The Sartorialist.” If one were to make comparisons, I’m obviously doing something more along those lines — of street fashion photography with attention to place as much as the person — than anything related to FRUITS. Yet, I do have my own distinctive style.
But in the big picture, Scott — yes, we are all taking pictures of people on the streets of our respective cities. So if that makes all of our work “the same” to you, who am I to tell you otherwise?
hideous pics.
#22: Fruits magazine is not at all about cosplay. It’s just regular people in the street.
I actually liked the initial concept of your FMS blog focusing on a sort of foot fetishism thing which I thought was original, but it doesn’t seem to be doing that these days.
I adblocked these pictures to save the bandwidth. These are not examples of the best.
#25: Never said FRUITS was about cosplay, nor about “decora”, a more recent trend that didn’t exist at the time that book was made. I just gave two examples of how I wasn’t trying to document a particular kind of street fashion culture tied to certain areas, which essentially doesn’t exist in Korea as it does in Japan.
And as for the original origins of the site, which started out as an experiment of a street photographer bored with taking the same street shots and realizing that street photo didn’t exist as a genre and won’t ever bring me success in Korea, I thought it would be fun to explore the notion of fetish, challenge myself technically, and I was simply fascinated with my then-recent move to digital, which allowed me to do thing I would have never have considered with expensive film.
I’m glad you liked it then, in the first 2-3 months or so I explored that, but it was also an experiment with where that would lead me, and satisfied what was actually the original way I started out taking pictures in Korea when I returned in 2002: street portraiture. It’s an evolving process, and I’m trying to find the balance point between “fashion” and “fetish”, which I intellectually reckon to be two sides of the same coin. I think that that part of what the site started as is still there, but I want to develop my skills in terms of street portraiture, street photography, and fashion-as-fetish. I’m still developing my style.
#27: OK, I hear you. BTW, cosplay has been huge in Korea for at least the last 5 or 6 years. There are massive cosplay conventions all the time here and it’s got a strong lesbian current to it. It’s mainly popular with middle- and high-school chicks here. “Performative” fashion is strong here, too.
Just like buying a fancy car to show off to all of your friends, huh?
Uh, no.
Just as your spelling “technique” is an improvement to English.