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

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.