How S. Korea became a major player in the streetwear game

Chyung Eun Ju and Joel Cho

By Chyung Eun Ju and Joel Cho

Walking along the most popular markets in S. Korea, it is not uncommon to stumble upon vendors that publicly display counterfeit products for sale. From Off-White to Commes des Garçons, it certainly seems that Korea has a reputable knockoff market for streetwear. The question that remains, however, is how did Korea become one of the largest consumers of street fashion and what does it mean being a leading player in this market?

Today, it is undeniable that streetstyle has established a market within the fashion industry in S. Korea, but this level of popularity of streetstyle that we see today did not happen organically, rather, it was heavily influenced by the cultural shift the country has experienced in the last few years.

Korea only started truly dipping its feet in the streetstyle scene, as we know it, with the acceleration of globalization of its trade, which was initially led by the Western market. Globalization meant the dissipation of entertainment, culture and fashion.

So, S. Korea, having cultivated strong ties with the United States in the recent years, experienced an influx of Western culture, having access to Western culinary, film, music and, of course, fashion. Seoul Fashion Week, for example, only debuted in Korea in 2000, years after Paris or New York Fashion Week.

This injection of Western culture within the country slowly started to pave the way to the success of streetstyle that we see today. Koreans grew more and more accustomed to the streetstyle references from abroad, from music to images of celebrities and other influential characters snapped at the main fashion events, this sparked the growth of a demand for the next trendy "must-have" items.

Amongst the various trends observed during the Westernization period in S. Korea, brands like Stüssy, Supreme and Off-White were taking over the fashion scene. So naturally a demand for these companies' products were growing in S. Korea, however, the country still had protectionist trade policies at this initial stage of globalization, with the government concerned in protecting local producers from foreign competition, explicitly adopting anti-import actions2.

Faced with this political barrier, S. Korea saw two solutions materializing to suppress the demand for Western streetstyle.

The first solution was the surge of the counterfeit market that we still see today. This market experienced mass success since, before the manufacturing of counterfeit streetwear, these articles were only available at exorbitant price tags. So, in some ways, this counterfeit culture democratized street fashion, making it accessible to Korean youth.

Simultaneously, as an alternative to the counterfeit market, independent S. Korean brands such as thisneverthat, Covernat, and Ader Error started to form because of the growing demand and streetwear as a global trend had already consolidated itself in the market, which helped Korean streetwear brands get exposure because they injected their own identities and voice to the market. And this phenomenon trickled down to medium and smaller markets. Which is why it seems Korea experienced a growth in streetstyle today.

So today Korea's streetstyle is experiencing the aftermath of this non-organic growth of streetstyle. At the same time that the country has a local high end streetstyle scene, evidenced by recent examples of skateboard ramp installations exposed in luxury hotel Ryse and the growing popularity of S. Korean street artists such as Grafflex and Royyaldog, it also experiences a darker side to the streetstyle boom - the counterfeit culture, which inspired Highsnobiety's 15-minute documentary "Counterfeit Culture" filmed during Seoul Fashion Week March 2017.

No matter where we draw the line on the legitimacy of the rise of Korea as a leading player in the street fashion scene, the country's massive influence over the market is clear.

In China, where K-Drama and K-Pop has a strong influence on Chinese consumers, S. Korean streetwear is flourishing. One of China's game-changing hip hop talent show "The Rap of China" was adapted from the S. Korean show "Show Me The Money". Chinese consumers are also vital to S. Korean apparel's revenue growth, in fact, globally. Off-White and Supreme were able to reach a fast growth of 62 percent from 2016 to 2017 due to Chinese consumers, according to a study by Nielsen and OFashion, a Chinese fashion shopping platform. In China the growth in streetwear brand spending was recorded to be almost four times higher than non-streetwear clothing from 2015 to 2020. And so, their interest in S. Korean streetwear also fuels the growth of this trend.

Evidently, the fact that the Chinese community, who make up a relevant portion of the streetwear consumer demographic, started to turn their interest towards S. Korean streetwear brands, got Korean creatives to start pushing away from the molds of the initial boom of streetstyle, leading to the development of new businesses, such as the case of parody brand "Gohard", a parady of the french "Goyard", that has sparked interest of the Chinese youth.

"In China streetwear consumerism is huge. There are already a lot of Korean brands in China and many Chinese buyers are interested in the Korean market," explained Brian Kim,the founder of WTFM Creative Agency. "Korea has become the next hyped placed to look for streetwear as streetwear culture has marked a strong presence nationally."

Artists such as N5bra and Grafflex got invited to China's highly-sought-out annual street trade show Yo'Hood, Homegrown fashion brands like ADER Error, AMBUSH and Gentle Monster have commercial success globally, KANGHYUK, founded by two Koreans, was named a semi-finalist for 2019 LVMH Prize and also featured in A$AP Rocky's video for his song "Tony Tone". IISE, a brand that translates Korean culture and modern streetwear, was showcased in New York Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2019 where they were chosen to debut the Nike Air More Uptempo 720 and displayed their collaboration with GORE-TEX.

So, although Korea might have had an inorganic growth of its streetstyle market, its consequential development of a strong counterfeit product and creative local companies with their own take on Western streetwear seems to have found a way to merge into a new exciting streetwear scene.

Eun Ju Chyung (ejc@wtfm.kr) and Joel Cho (joel@wtfm.kr) are editors at WTFMAG (http://www.whatthefunmag.com)

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