“I think they’re confused,” says the blogger Hong Sukwoo as he slowly drinks his strawberry juice with a straw in the ornate Las Vegas-meets-grandma marble lobby of Seoul’s Imperial Palace Hotel. Sukwoo is talking about Korea’s younger generation, the K-pop kids now in their late teens and early 20s who have plenty of disposable cash and a burning desire to be unique, but who barely have a clue who they are. Sukwoo, at the ripe age of 28, already considers himself part of an earlier “not so beautiful, but perhaps more thoughtful” generation. For the past four years, he has been filling his Your Boyhood blog (yourboyhood.com) with the photos he takes of Seoul’s jeunesse dorée and essays that read like sad, disjointed poems (at least when you try to decipher them with your computer’s instant translator). For him the blog is still in the early stages of a project he imagines will take him about 10 more years: to record the passing youth of one of Asia’s — and the world’s — speediest fast-track cultures. “Young Koreans haven’t found their own style yet, so they’re copying images they find on the Internet,” he says. “It’s a form of stylish cosplay.”
Sensing my lack of comprehension, he quickly summons the Wikipedia definition on his iPod Touch: “Cosplay is a kind of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Any entity, real or virtual, may serve as the subject including inanimate objects, and gender switching is common.” Says Sukwoo: “Young Koreans understand taste, but what they’re wearing isn’t really them.”
This explains a lot about Seoul fashion week’s fall/winter 2010-11 edition, which featured a parade of boys in lipstick, baby-faced thugs, Russian toy soldiers, escort girls stumbling down the runway in glittering sleep masks, mountain climbers in three-piece banker’s suits, party princesses sporting diamond-studded teddy jackets and cartoon sweaters and “I Dream of Jeanie” pants, the homeless simultaneously wearing everything for present and future use on their backs, chic young Navajo professionals, Asian hillbillies acting out toilet jokes in fringed leggings and hoodies with animal ears, enough zippers to change one piece into five different looks, and an army of trench coats that made the Seoul runways last week seem like one big open casting for a fashionable remake of “Casablanca.”
Just down the hill, in the 10th-floor glass box above the two-year-old Korean branch of her 10 Corso Como shop, Carla Sozzani was holding a press tour of the opening of an exhibition of Guy Bourdin’s films curated by Shelly Verthime and Nicolle Meyer, his longtime model. The store and 10CC cafe, where Seoul’s elite come to nibble tea cakes and eyeball each other, is a co-production with Lee Seo-Hyun, the vice president of Cheil, the fashion arm of the Korean giant Samsung. Sozzani says she makes four or five trips a year here to percolate the store’s mix — Tom Binns baubles, the Olive Oyl-shaped Alaïa dresses she wears and, soon to arrive, limited editions from Seoul’s hottest young women’s labels, Johnny Hates Jazz and Jain Song.
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