DDP - accidental wonder

A paepi attendee at last season’s Seoul Fashion Week in March 2017 stands on the street fashion “runway” that is the in-between transition point between insider and outsider status, ground level and underground, indoors and outdoors, ground and sky, and even high and low fashion. Her sukajan jacket is a melange of remixed signs and symbols.

By Michael Hurt

Even before the construction of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) got underway, it faced relentless, withering fire from critics who called the project a “monstrosity” and even an “abomination.” According to prevailing notions of what Seoul was, historically, architecturally and culturally, the building seemed like an extremely incongruous fit at best, a mortally grievous insult to the legacy of the capital city at worst.

Just before and as the DDP began construction, many architectural theorist folks critical of the project called it a building chosen as an object of spectacle. They weren’t calling it “spectacular” in a good way, nor merely talking about it as an object to look at. They were using the concept of the “Society of the Spectacle” put forth in 1967 by French theorist Guy Debord. He warned about the spectacle as a sign of society entering hypermodernity, in which the signs and symbols (“referers”) in mass media culture became more important than the original things themselves (“referents”). The “referer” is like the word “tree,” which is different from the original object, the “referent,” which would be the actual tree composed of a wooden trunk, roots and green leaves. In its present form, one’s Facebook picture would be the referer, while one’s actual, physical, flesh-and-blood self would be the referent.

In a society that has entered hypermodernity, the referers become of prime importance, to the point that the originals no longer matter, and everything becomes an alphabet soup of signs and symbols floating around in a morass of real meaninglessness. Indeed, in that sense, Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun is not any more or less real than Pikachu, is no more or less fake than George Clooney.

The DDP was criticized as a spectacle object, absent of real substance or practical use, existing only to drive up the number of tourists and gawkers. And as the project/building took shape, criticism arose that the building was simply ugly and an aesthetic mismatch to either 1) other modern buildings or 2) older structures nearby of great historical value.

However, even though the then-mayor and city planners did indeed seem mainly concerned with garnering international attention by having world-famous architect Zaha Hadid’s name on something spectacular in Seoul city, the DDP ended up surpassing all expectations as an intelligent, useful and socially amazing structure. In order to understand this, one has to be familiar with the relatively obscure concept of “flexible sociality.”

Professor Cho Myung-rae talked about Seoul’s extremely strong trait of “flexible sociality” as something that makes the city and its culture unique. The idea is that Korea and its capital city is a living, evolving record of the history of development, in which the spaces that define Seoul are a mishmash of old and new, West and East, traditional and modern, so many contrasts crammed up next to one another and even overlapping and tangling into each other in intertwining trails and tendrils.

This “flexible sociality” is a good fit with the architectural design principle with which Zaha Hadid made the DDP, that of “parametricism,” which, simply put, is the idea that a building’s spaces should be not only designed with flexible uses in mind, but that the uses of the space should naturally follow the needs of the people using them. This is why the DDP building has no hard edges, no real rooms with beginnings or endings, no defined spatial limits. This is how the building allowed the street fashion scene to “take over” the Seoul Fashion Week (SFW) event that is ostensibly designed as a showcase for high fashion runway shows, their designers, buyers and the press. But within a space that has no up or down, inside or out, or even clearly defined rooms, the formerly disenfranchised paepi who were literal outsiders at the former location of SFW have become its most powerful insiders. Those at the periphery have become the main players, the main event. In combination with organizational problems with SFW and structural shifts in the fashion industry, the DDP has allowed a group of kids with little social capital to flip the entire field completely, since now the long, wide ramp that descends down from outside ground level to inside and underground and which turns SFW’s high runway shows into window dressing for the true main event ― the street fashion “runway.” That the DDP has turned a bunch of kids who formerly had to wait in the parking lot into the stars of the entire event is the true proof of how DDP has allowed the pre-existing flexible sociality of Seoul to become amplified by the building’s parametric power into an international explosion of renown that is now the reason WWD, Vogue, The New York Times, and other media outlets such as Vice, Hypebeast, and Highsnobiety now pay close attention to Korean fashion in a way they never did before the opening of DDP in 2012 and the resultant rapid quickening and maturation of the Korean street fashion scene. The flipping of the fashion field is the proof of Zaha Hadid’s notion of parametricism as a design principle, and Seoul city planners’ ultimate decision to choose to construct the ultimate example of parametricism in the world.

Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. The whole article with more photos is available on The Korea Times' website. Contact kuraeji@gmail.com.