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CONCEPT KOREA AT PITTI UOMO 86
Words and pictures by Jasper L
Words and pictures by Jasper L
The South Koreans had their own pavilion at this summer’s trade-show, and although a couple of designers spilled into the main concourse, the guest designers were largely concentrated into a space that was maybe a thousand feet square. I visited on the last day, and was the only person inside save the sales reps. They didn’t seem particularly happy to have me there, and I felt more than a little awkward with the number of eyes that were focused on me alone.
The street-goth look is, obviously, something of a money-maker these days. The high-fashion houses are one obvious source of #ALLBLVCK (you have to say the hashtag out loud), but there are a lot of younger brands reinterpreting athletic-wear (taken very broadly) in a number of ways. The other cadre was rooted in bright colors and very graphic prints, but n a sense, it was all of it a departure from the normal Streetwear scene at Pitti, which tends to be somewhat fixated on the rumpled and the handmade (there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, but allow me the generalization) - the garments shown by the South Koreans were noticeably clean, noticeably modern, and noticeably rooted in (Michael Kors voice) Sportswear. And yes, there was a lot of airmesh.
I can’t fit six designers into a single post, so I’ll focus on a couple. One, Byungmun Seo, is a young man who happily informed me that his SS15 collection is entitled “Rebels at the Dawn of the New Era.” The collection is uniformly black and white, and at its best looks a bit like a monochrome wardrobe made for Akira. It’s not the draped, urban goth look that we’re used to; instead the focus is on technical fabrics and combining slim and wide silhouettes, generally with a cinched top and a looser bottom. There’s a lot of neoprene and a lot of (you guessed it) airmesh, a lot of boxy shapes and a lot of squared-off (or nearly-so) edges. It’s the future, courtside. But what was perhaps more important than the clothes themselves was the designer’s obvious overflow of ideas (which did lead to a somewhat overstuffed booth), his obvious interest, and his obvious passion. In my book those are three very admirable qualities.
Münn, by Hyun-min Han, represented the second family of Korean designers to show at Pitti 86; the ones rooted in more obviously classic clothing, but heavily tweaked and updated. Instead of blacks and whites, Münn showed a collection of largely office-appropriate greys, beiges and whites, although obviously reworked and reimagined. Again, the lines are very clean - it’s a far cry from the Wooster showcase. It was very urban and very sleek, reminiscent in some ways of Prada’s technical experiments, or even (and this is not disparaging) old ready-to-wear JCPenney suiting, reimagined for the 21st century. If South Korea is the most modern country in the world, theirs was also the most unabashedly modern clothing at Pitti (Veilance and Diemme would also contend for this crown, I imagine).
The more I wandered around, the more the “Dawn of the New Era” bit seemed apt, not just for Byungmun Seo’s collection, and maybe not just for the Concept Korea pavilion. Now that street-goth (bling goth? future-basketball?) is very much a part of the mainstream, I had this (perhaps years late) realization that this (both street-goth and future-office), really, is where fashion is headed. Not even headed - that’s where we are. In a way, the new Korean designers exhibited a (conscious or not, I don’t know) rejection of the focus on the old-world heritage labels, and a celebration not of where we were in some invented golden era, but of where we are heading. Perhaps the Korean designers are the best extension of the Pitti ethos: reimagining classic garments, making clothing easy to wear but in a way that fits a more stable vision of the future than the urban nomads of the late-oughts were picturing; more optimistic and more realistic. Even if the young guns haven’t quite made it to the front lines, new blood is coming.
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