Or so I was forced to report in the Korea Herald a few days ago. I really wished to be able to be all giddy and boosterish for Seoul Fashion Week, as I had been in other seasons, but the many negative experiences our team had, combined with those of many others at the show, made that impossible. In addition, people at other foreign outlets (see here and here and here and here) didn’t have much positive to report, either.
In short, the show was plagued by too much fronting on the part of many of the various staff and management agencies involved, which compounded the extreme disorganization and lack of central direction (the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome), and too much fawning over the fact of there being more foreign media there this year than actually doing things to make their stay easier here (things that had been done in previous seasons, actually).
In even shorter short, it seems that the fashion folks got way too big for their britches before-the-fact, along with being so obsessed with the “overseas press” that they quite nearly gave the domestic press a slap in the face. If you’ve got an honored guest for dinner, sure — give him a bit more food, pour her an extra glass of wine; but don’t start sneering at me and taking my food off my plate. Domestic expat press is responsible for quite a bit of the Googled content about Korean fashion, so treating us like the “red-headed stepchild” was a bad idea.
In true “Korea, Sparkling” form (and it’s no surprise things got like this, since City Hall was so in the mix this season), a lot of this was caused by Korean administrators jumping up and down for joy at the apparently higher international profile of their show that they 1) instantly forgot the people who helped get them there, at least in the non-Korean Internet, and 2) the very Korean instinct to make things “luxury” and “elite” and distinguishing between who is “VIP” and who is now no longer necessary; the result is haughty organizers more concerned with boosting their own sense of rising self-importance than actually doing what needs to be done to make a good show.
And the idea that people were being told that certain events were “too high-profile” for them, or that certain seats had to be reserved for the mythical “foreign” press — but nearly all the shows had empty general (and even sometimes press and VIP) seats — that spoke volumes about where this attitude and management style is taking Seoul Fashion Week.
31/10/2008 at 12:39 pm Permalink
Ugh… I just read through your article at the Korean Herald. I’m a big fashion buff (even if I occasionally dress like a bum), and any desire I had of attending a future Korean Fashion Week just flew out the window.
31/10/2008 at 12:52 pm Permalink
Sorry about that! I had a great time at SFW, but as a member of the press, my fun was dowsed with constantly being asked to stop taking pictures, to give up my seat to apparently real “foreign press”, and once being yelled at that I wasn’t EVEN press. Asked by my editor to report on the experience of expat press at SFW, I was stuck. Even sugar-coating was impossible — our experience was pretty bad compared to previous seasons, and it was echoed (although not in the extreme degree) by nearly every other person we were able to sit down and talk to — foreign or domestic, Korean or non.
I’d encourage you to go to future shows, where I think they’ll be much better — we’re not the only ones, by any stretch, giving the SFW people holy hell. They got blasted before the week even ended by a trade publication (Fashion Insight) and consistently received complaints, often public and on blogs and sites, from many attendees of the show.
Sad, but true. Here’s hoping they take the critiques to heart — because there are many — and improve things in the seasons to come.
31/10/2008 at 4:51 pm Permalink
I was so interested in what you had to say that my reply turned out to be quite long — so I’m posting it to my blog as well — but here goes!
It’s sad to hear that the domestic press was treated so poorly — I’m sorry you had that experience. I was part of the international VIP/reporter contingent and I happened to bring a Korean friend with me to one of the shows — unfortunately, she was treated with disdain similar to that which you experienced. At the very same moment she was being harassed and blockaded from entry, I was whisked to the VIP section, as if my white skin was itself evidence of VIP status.
But, I would suggest that what happened at Fashion Week did not start with the shortcomings of producers or designers or even politicians. It was a much larger failure — the failure of national imagination, the imagination to see Korea as offering not something better or worse but something different—something we can’t get in the West. But in Korea, it seems too often that to be a “different” Korean is to be no Korean at all.
The Korean narrative is one of black and white — the lines are clear: certain things are Korean, certain people are Korean, certain habits and behaviors and norms are Korean, and others are not. The entire narrative sells the lie that Koreans are one people. It’s a myth. Koreans are not ONE people. Despite the strongest of conformity-inducing social norms, Koreans are (closeted or openly) fluent in other tongues, born to foreign parents, perfectly happy with American beef, and, I dare say it, homosexuals, alcoholics and homeless. The idea that Koreans are ONE people is an outrageous fallacy, matched in its fantastic departure from reality only by the PRC’s claim to ONE China. The difference is that ONE China (including Taiwan and Tibet) serves the purposes of Beijing pretty well, while Korea is none too better off for its compulsory, uniform bliss.
There is a chaos and diversity to Korea that one feels nowhere more than in Seoul, but at Fashion Week’s SETEC sterility won out over style. Gee Choon Hee’s Pearl Harbor fantasy land was saccharine, cutesy and trite—exactly the qualities international journalists didn’t come to see swaying down the runway before them. But it’s not just Gee Choon Hee whom I fault – it’s the totalizing narrative from which she drew, the narrative that says uniformly: Korean women are cute, Korean women are delicate, Korean women are waiting for their man to come home after performing their duty—the same narrative that chides physical imperfection as something “un-Korean”, something that really ought to be “repaired” through plastic surgery, the same narrative that fuels the cupcake girl, look-a-likes who stroll around Appujeong as Barbie-dolls-made-real. Myung Rye drew from the very same narrative, producing Cinderella ball gowns that matched Hee’s “Pearl Harbor” with an ante of “Disney”. But Seoul is not the Magic Kingdom, and internationals didn’t need to cross the globe to see period dresses from a screen play shot at Versailles.
On the other hand, alternative venues, like Daily Projects, were a hit precisely because they captured a genuine sense of difference. They reflected a multi-vocal narrative that more truly reflects what it means to be Korean—heterogeneous, diverse, imperfect—like everyone else.
The “hermit kingdom” would do well to support a heterogeneous national identity that speaks more to truth than to fantasy. And Fashion Week is as good a place to start as any. Bring it out, Korea — the real you, the you with all your scars. You’ve shown the world that you’re good enough: Samsung, LG and now even Hyundai—these are international triumphs. Your CEOs even face jail time, just like ours. We know your stuff is good, and frankly, we’re not afraid that you’re trying to poison us with low-cost, acid-dripping batteries in the phones you ship overseas. So, look, we want your phones, your televisions and your cars—and we’d eat up your clothes too, if only you wouldn’t sell us the whitewashed dream of a perfect life. Unlike the Korean home goods store, “My Life is Perfect”, my life is not perfect, and I’m pretty sure no one’s is. So, put the brakes on fantasy shows and give us some real fashion. I reckon you could even get some of us internationals to sit in the back, the way we do everywhere else.
http://alwaysinwonderland.wordpress.com
31/10/2008 at 5:24 pm Permalink
AMEN!
01/11/2008 at 10:34 am Permalink
Mark, that comment was epic and amazing: it sums up so much of the trouble with Korea’s promotion, not just in fashion, but many areas, and perfectly shows the constantly problematic and recurrently trouble-causing gap between what Korea IS, and how Korea wants to be seen by others.