Musinsa turns Seongsu's symbolic warehouse into fashion hotspot

Inside the Musinsa Store Seongsu@Daelim Chango, located in eastern Seoul's trendy Seongsu-dong, remnants can still be seen of the building's past as a rice mill built in the 1970s. Korea Times photo by Ko Dong-hwan.

Musinsa has turned a symbolic decades-old warehouse in eastern Seoul's Seongsu-dong into its latest offline shop for young fashion lovers, according to the country’s leading select fashion platform, Thursday.

With its first select shop in one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods, the company is looking to attract more foreign customers with local brands that represent the country’s authentic K-fashion.

Musinsa Store Seongsu@Daelim Chango is built on the site of Daelim Warehouse, a rice mill built in the 1970s. The store preserves the warehouse’s original building materials and construction methods, leaving them exposed for visitors to see. Old bricks with uneven cement and rusty steel beams supporting a gabled ceiling overwhelm the single-story shop’s 704-square-meter space inside and out.

The warehouse turned into an art gallery in 2016. It created buzz and became popular, building a reputation as a unique space where the past and the present coexist. A Musinsa official said that it was this gallery that has signaled the rise of Seongsu as it is now.

The signboard of Daelim Warehouse is seen at Musinsa Store Seongsu. Courtesy of Musinsa

Musinsa rented the venue and started renovating the space in June. The company wanted to extend the place’s history and heritage to create synergy with the store's modern decorations. It left the warehouse’s original signboard outside the shop to preserve its origin. It borrowed the “M” shape from the warehouse’s gabled roof and used it for the shop’s logo. A large-scale media façade (21 meters wide, 7 meters high) inside also left intact two original openings in the warehouse that pose as passages connecting two halls.

The company’s third offline select shop in the country came as Seongsu has proven to be a rising hotspot among foreign tourists. According to Tourism Data Lab, an online open-source platform run by Korea Tourism Organization, the total expenditures by foreigners in Seongsu from January to July registered 38 billion won ($28 million), up 84 percent from the previous year. Taking into account customers in Seongsu who made purchases with credit cards during the same period, Korean women in their 20s were found to be the biggest consumer group, at 16.9 percent.

Musinsa said that K-fashion is gaining increasing attention from tourists. At Musinsa Store Hongdae in western Seoul, 30 percent of visitors from January to August were foreigners. Some 85 percent of over 100 brands in the company’s offline select shops are domestic brands, a reason the company purports to promote K-fashion.

“Musinsa Store Seongsu will become a K-fashion mecca,” the official said. “A tax refund kiosk and leaflets, digital signs in English, Japanese and Chinese were all prepared to help foreign shoppers.”