[Mike Hurt on Fashion] Korean fashion wave in the making?제니카페<cafe.naver.com/writergeni>

Last month, there was a brief tremor that signaled the start of something much bigger to come. For those of you not too familiar with the fashion world, major fashion shows in cities around the world refer to their Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter exhibitions using monikers such as "Paris Fashion Week" or "Milan Fashion Week." So it goes with New York or Tokyo, and now so it goes with Seoul.

For the first time ever, Seoul has started formally referring to its former "Seoul Collection Fashion Show" by the more confident-sounding title of "Seoul Fashion Week," along the lines of other respected cities holding shows around the world. The act of doing so not only indicates a real and palpable increase in international interest in Korean fashion, but also signals the crucial shift towards a self-conscious intention to actively gain more attention in a purposeful and more organized way.

The last time such a convergence between international recognition and institutional self-awareness happened, it ended up being called a "wave." Now, history repeats itself as some (perhaps as over-optimistically as in the previous case) have started talking about a "Korean fashion wave."

As the overall fashion-consciousness of the Korean people meets international trends, Korea is becoming a fashion hotspot to watch. I chalk it up to a combination of an required formality that keeps people "dressed to kill," tempered by a Confucian social conservatism that keeps the extremes in check, a constant limiting tendency that has been pushed and stretched recently by the new looks now coming through the internet over the last few years.

For this reason, the look of the Korean street is distinctively pret-a-porter, or "ready-to-wear." By contrast, Japanese fashion is quite peculiar and unique, and perhaps too much so. In Japan, the social limitations don`t seem to work the same way, allowing fashion to wend and bend into all sorts of directions, to all kinds of extremes. Accordingly, much of everyday Japanese fashion seems more couture in terms of its sheer wildness and the many fashion subcultures that are not generalizable anywhere outside of Japan.

Indeed, Korea`s unique position has produced not just a new clothing trend that happens to presently overlap with the international tastes of today, but rather, defines a truly unique Korean style. This does not mean that the Seoul street is immune from international trends, but again, is the result of contemporary trends and influences around the world coming together within the unique Korean condition. This has resulted in a lot more attention being paid to Seoul.

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, people from all over the world could start taking real notice of what people are and aren`t wearing in Seoul and perhaps even Pusan. Who knows? Would anyone have thought of Korea as a major source of hot new directors and films in 1998?

All these changes have been taking place on the Korean streets over the last few years, occurring in a telltale pattern. Yet, the fabulousness of Korean fashion -- in terms of how the Korean public is interpreting, transmitting, and actually defining it with their own bodies -- cannot be created or controlled by central government planning, the desires of the fashion industry, or even the dictates of commercialism. Those factors can help quicken any "fashion wave" into reality, but everything still begins and ends with what everyday Koreans are wearing on the street.

(kuraeji@gmail.com)

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