Discovered Anthology

You might have gathered from my Instagram that I’m currently in Seoul in Korea for Seoul Fashion Week – or Hera Seoul Fashion Week – as it’s the first season SFW has come under private sponsorship.  The week will be coming to a close soon and I’ll be posting on the shows from the as a whole but first up, let’s marvel at what I think has been one of the best all-in-one fashion week venues I’ve been to ever.  With the inauguration of the Zaha Hadid-designed Dongdaemun Design Plaza (or DDP for short) last year, SFW found its new natural home, where every approach into a fashion show feels like you’re embarking on a space odyssey.  I’ve been in awe of the scale of the thing everyday this week and at night, this bulbous metal blob lights up, which makes you slightly giddy when you’re walking through its tunnels and passages.

If you follow the trail of  200,000 planted LED roses right now, you’ll find yourself at the free-for-all retrospective exhibition, ‘ANTHOLOGY of Jin Teok, Creation of 50 Years’, the opening of which kicked off SFW last Thursday.  I vaguely knew of Teok’s name but didn’t really know too much about the context and finer details of her work.  Suzy Menkes contributed the foreword to the exhibition, which summed up Teok’s work like this:

In this culture of MORE! – more sound, more colour, more fashion, more relentless noise – Jin Teok has offered us, for half a century, something uniquely precious: the still, small voice of calm.

Walking in, suddenly the noise of Dongdaemun is indeed turned right down.  Teok was part of a Korean fashion collection, which began to emerge in the early 90s, but her work in fashion dates back the 1960s when she helped pioneer Korea’s contemporary fashion scene.  Like the Japanese in the 1980s, Teok, along with fellow Koreans Lee Young-Hee and Sul Yun-Hyoung (who are all being highlighted in the current Korea Now! exhibition at the Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris as part of the France-Korea year), came to Paris to make their mark.  Their sombre and refined work bears little relation to the K-Pop and hallyu wave of fashion that dominates Seoul Fashion Week today.  In reply to Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto’s penchant for black, Teok answers back mostly in Edwardian blouse-derived whites and delicate shades of cream.  Although exaggerated and body-morphing silhouettes permeate Teok’s collections, an understated femininity is present in her work, where texture and touch are integral.  Teok makes great use of traditional Korean elements too as seen in the embroidered floral motifs and her use of Korean fabrics such as the very fine mosi (a gauze-like fabric made out of the ramie plant and typically worn in the summer) and stiffened silks that are used in hanboks.

Jin Teok’s presence behind the in yer’ face happenings of SFW at DDP is a potent reminder that there is a soul in Seoul’s fashion heritage.  It’s a powerful respite if you’re in Seoul and you find yourself wandering in after you’ve got your fill of pics of the plastic roses.