The Korea Times - Home

Site Map PDF Subscription Register LogIn
Site Map PDF Subscription Register LogIn

Fri, April 20, 2018 | 19:22

Opinion > Blogs > Fashion Field Notes >

Black Steel in the hour of Korean hip-hop

The colors of Korean hip-hop right now, as expressed through Korean rapper Changstarr at club Lucid Dream in Itaewon. All photos by Michael HurtBy Michael HurtI got a letter from a promoterThe other dayI opened and read itIt said they were hip-hopThey wanted me to take photos of whateverPictures and me and OG rappers, I said whenever!In actuality, I saw the news come across m...

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-04-12 15:31

Seoul Fashion Week and its hypermodern youth

So-called “street fashion” is a strange and wonderful thing that is almost as oxymoronic as it is deceptively simple and self-explanatory. “Street fashion” as it is talked about in the days since the concept of the “straight-up” was introduced in i-D magazine in 1984 as straight, unfiltered pictures of real people from “the street”, has always contained the connotation of “re...

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-04-01 10:43

Tradition tackled: New takes on hanbok

My latest project involves taking the traditional Korean hanbok and its traditional photographic treatment from new angles, by placing it quite literally in different light, and by placing it onto different bodies - or at least bodies possessed of difference relative to the traditional Korean center.

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-03-17 10:06

Urban stages: I went to Harajuku and found exactly what I was looking for

I recently gave an academic talk on street fashion culture at a forum in Tokyo, at Seijo University. So I leapt at the opportunity to get to know the (in)famous Harajuku and Shibuya scenes by shooting them after my presentation.

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-03-08 15:08

Baby got bok, or an attempt to aesthetically separate hanbok from the Korean body (Part 1)

As a photographer and visual sociologist, I have always found hanbok the traditional clothing worn by Korean people deeply interesting. And I don’t mean “interesting” in the sense that I want to wear it, but rather in the sense that as a symbol of Koreanness itself, and as an object worn on the body, it is the object that is most charged with a corporealized Koreanness. And i...

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-03-03 10:28

Black Panther in Korea and watching truly marvelous Marvel and Posing of 'Wakanda Question'

I wrote the original version of this post on February 15, the day after the film premiered in South Korea. Our little group, comprised largely of members of the “Brothas and Sistas in South Korea” social and Facebook group, arranged the earliest possible showing we could get through the Yongsan Lotte Cinema. As a custom screening, it provided for our mostly black and black-co...

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-02-22 11:23

The standing wave theory of hallyu

It is high time to rethink the concept and metaphor of the “Korean wave." Originally conceived in 1999 as a metaphor of water crashing, inexorably, onto the shore, the main power and crux of the metonymic use of the “wave” as a stand-in for culture crashing, unstoppable in its force and persistency, upon a (foreign) shore is rhetorically as useful as it is logically unsound a...

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-02-09 13:24

Changing attitudes toward sex in Korea

One can read the title of this story in the sense of either a noun or a verb, but were one to take it in the active sense, this story would be about how some people are working to change ideas about sexuality in Korea in an embodied way; by putting their bodies on the line, flesh into the game.

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-02-01 14:26

Fashion field notes from Saigon

I recently went to Ho Chi Minh City (nee Saigon) for a conference and decided to take a methodological leap and use the idea of identity performance (refer to my “Girl Life Is a Drag” column) as a marker to track lines of cultural influence.

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-01-18 15:17

The wonder of the winter miniskirt

If you know Seoul, you know the cold winter weather is little deterrent to the wearing of even the shortest of miniskirts. Not for all, but for some possessed of high degrees of fashion fortitude in even the lowest of temperatures, the miniskirt is a point of pride, not to mention a marker of truly formidable femininity even in the face of freezing.

Fashion Field Notes | 2018-01-11 15:10

1 2

Missile attack on Syria