South Korea is shaping up as the next hotbed of innovative menswear, with three of its most prominent designers creating tailoring with a twist for an international audience just as Seoul itself is becoming something of a fashion center.
But unlike the Japanese designers Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, who established their international reputations in the 1980s with a radical departure from traditional silhouettes, the Korean designers Juun J., Songzio and Wooyoungmi are offering traditional shapes in new proportions and juxtapositions. All three will be showing their spring 2010 collections in Paris later this week.
Juun J., a serious-looking Asian man with a trench coat obsession, is a master at intricate cutting, often fusing elements from several pieces into one overlapping silhouette.
The style can be seen in this spring’s best sellers: A riding jacket with a vest front in nylon and leather and a double jacket. It can be worn layered, or with the second jacket tied around the hips like an overshirt.
And Mr. Juun’s plaid shirts for fall look almost like capes, as do his beloved trench coats.
“It takes more time for us to set up the show in Paris, but the results have been worth it,” said the 42-year-old designer, who first showed in Paris two years ago. “I only wish we had come to Europe sooner, because the current economy is making everything take longer.”
The label, which has an annual sales volume of €920,000, or nearly $1.3 million, is found at Seven in New York, Bantone in Milan and Kabuki and the new Hotel Particulier in Paris.
Songzio’s fall collection featured tailoring with complex seaming inspired by Korean samurai battle dress mixed with billowy, hooded shapes.
The 40-year-old designer divides his time between Seoul and Paris, where his wife and son live. He has had his own brand for 15 years and showed in Paris for several years, but he still didn’t think he was ready to sell internationally until Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong persuaded him recently to deliver a small order.
For his spring 2010 collection Songzio is inspired by the bubble eyes of koi fish in a natural style, with soft shoulders, raglan sleeves and large pants.
Wooyoungmi said she got her ideas from architecture — like the Blur building designed by Diller and Scofidio for the Swiss National Expo in 2002, which inspired her spring 2009 collection’s “mix of tradition and delicacy.”
The 49-year-old was the first Korean men’s designer to show in Paris, in 2002, and she now has a store in the city’s trendy Marais neighborhood. Hers also is the largest of the Korean brands showing in Paris, with an annual sales volume of €17.5 million. This year she is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her Solid Homme by Wooyoungmi brand and will open three spots in Japan in August, which, she said, will make her the first Korean men’s designer to expand into that market.
The Koreans’ headline status also has a lot to do with changes in their home markets.
“Korean menswear started to take off seven or eight years ago,” Mr. Juun said. “I think Korean men are becoming very Japanese. They want to look good at work, and they’re interested in fashion.”
Korean men do look good, thanks in part to the country’s two-year compulsory military service and its emphasis on bodybuilding. Add to that the country’s burgeoning entertainment industry and the fact that Seoul has become trendy.
The style uptake can be seen on the blog Your Boyhood (yourboyhood. blogspot.com), where Hang Sukwoo, a fashion observer, posts snapshots of the city’s fashion crowd. The majority are young men in a mix of trendy European brands as well as young Korean and Japanese labels. And last year the electronics giant Samsung opened the Seoul branch of 10 Corso Como, a four-story supersized version of the Milan icon, in Chungdam Dong, the city’s fashion hub.
For John Storey, a consultant with the Japanese brand Ato, and Christophe Lemaire, whose collection is produced in Japan, South Korea is a convenient and growing source of business.
“Seoul is only an hour and a half flight from Tokyo. And over the last two years, Korean multibrand shops have become our biggest customers. Like the Japanese, the Koreans started out buying only big brands, and now they’re also interested in more avant-garde labels.”
And some young Koreans are starting their own brands, like Park Do Gun, a co-founder and designer of the label Attic from S.T.A.D. The brand showed its first men’s collection, inspired by old novels, at Korean fashion week last March.
The D. GNAK collection designed by Don Jun Kang, 31, is inspired by Mafiosi films like “Carlito’s Way” and “Scarface.” Mr. Kang, who studied fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York, is opening two stores in Seoul this summer, introducing a Web site and planning to show at foreign trade fairs.
And Han Sang Hyuk, 38, creative director of MVIO, a moderately priced collection produced by Samsung, has based his fall collection on the natty tailoring that he imagines would have been worn by Sherlock Holmes.
“Samsung asked me to reshape MVIO’s identity. So the fall collection is about looking for evidence and trying to solve a mystery,” Mr. Han said. “It’s a bit like young Korean men who are finding their fashion clues on the Internet.”
Photo:Kent/WireImage 
