my two cents.
Keep on writing and taking pics man.

I no longer live in Korea, but I used to for a few years — it would be ridiculous to try to argue that the above photos aren’t an integral part of what makes Korean fashion. No, it’s not ALL Korean women wear, but all of the above pictures have a distinct Korean feel to me that I don’t quite see anywhere else in the world. In fact, I get stared at when I wear the clothes I bought in Korea at home, because it does, in fact, look different, and is not something that you commonly see on the streets here in Austria, or anywhere else in the Western world to my knowledge.

And there’s nothing wrong with it. FMS is trying to pick up on fashion trends, and surely the Korean style of dressing ‘faux-modestly’ is one of the most striking and interesting. Instead of being offended by it, I would feel proud that my country’s streets look unique. With a few exceptions, this website strikes me as very pro-Korean (in the sense that FMS and most of the posters here seem to have a healthy affinity and appreciation for Korea, its people, and its fashion).

However, our whole reason for existing is looking at the streets, tracking trends and interesting patterns, and presenting it to the world. Isn’t that largely the job of any site reporting on fashion, what people are wearing?

I argue that yes, Korean women wear full dresses or mini-dresses far, far more than American women do. In fact, during the summer, a frilly mini-dress covering the shoulders and with a high hem, worn with high heels of some type, is one of the most common ensembles you’ll see here. By sheer number alone, I feel it is very safe to say that this is a popular Korean form of dress. If that offends you, I apologize, but I stand by my observation.

It is also my observation that American women tended to dress just like that in the 1960’s, but don’t today. That’s also an observation that I think to be true. I also think this to be a valid observation, and I frankly don’t see what is offensive about saying so, but again, if that somehow caused offense, I apologize.

In korea, culturally, showing the cleavage will be considered very sexy. On the other hand, showing up the legs will be considered sexy in US. Also I think Korean woman are more modest girls in general in dressing up.

There are so much influence from all over the world that I can’t really pin point this is Korea style, but I think most girls try to dress as comfortable without looking tacky or old-fashioned as it used to.

Last few years, korea fashion has been growing big time, and I can say some korean street fashioner are very world-wide good looking people.

I just want to say that specific examples against FMSs point of view aren’t necessarily evidence that a generalisation isn’t observing a common occurrence.

I find FMSs arguments countering any accusation by those who have commented to be satisfactory and well thought out.

There’s my 2cents worth. I hope I haven’t insulted anyone angry by contributing

I think that’s the crux of why this post hit a nerve with people. MAYBE it’s okay to generalize to Koreans because they’re so homogeneous, but you’re going to get into trouble when you contrast it with “Western” because that covers so many different sorts of people. And, granted, he did single out a too narrow swatch of selected Western cultures in which he thought women dressed in a more “feminine” way.

Of COURSE what FMS is talking about is that this is bound up in Korean culture to some degree (but a lot of young Korean women are shrugging it off too…thank goodness). In general, women still very much must put on an overtly feminine facade because having a uterus isn’t quite enough.

Better them than me. I’ll be wearing pants to work today but the thing is so will a few female Korean professors.

Well, I didn’t say that NO women get done up anymore. These women you speak of are from another decade! Older women whose teenage years were spent in 50s or 60s. Women in their 20s now might rock a fedora or a cute newsboy cap, but a big fancy church hat I don’t think so. Maybe for Easter. I think you might be the exception to the rule when it comes to pantyhose (at least in the Midwest, I’ve never been to the South)! I only know one person my age who wears pantyhose and it’s only because she’s a lawyer and dress code is still dictated by the old boys club.

And just as you said that black women also like to get done up as part of their culture. Isn’t it possible that FMS is also saying Korean women like to get done up in part because of their culture? I have co-worker whose in her late 40s and she absolutely recoils at flip flops. She doesn’t understand why her daughters would leave the house in what she essentially considers as beach shoes or house shoes. I’m glad that we don’t have to worry about those things anymore.

I agree, for the most part, but the thing is there are some of us who do wear pantyhose. In fact, I have my shipped in from Nordstrom department store a couple of times a year or wait until I fly home to pick my preferred brand up. Also, in the winter, you’re guaranteed to see me wearing heavier hose a la DKNY or ordered from the Eddie Bauer website.

You’re right about a lesser standard in general. But that’s also culture. My mother pin curled her hair at night. If I have somewhere to be the next day I’ll twist my hair up too. So a lot of it is tradition and culture as, although pop culture focuses much more on negative stereotypes, black American women tend to like to be put together if they have the means to do so. The same sort of fashion show FeetManSeoul refers to at Ewha (…yawn…) can be seen at just about any southern Baptist church congregation complete with set hair, hose, coordinated outfits and a few fancy hats too.

to FMS -

re Ewha, so because it’s a wide spread MYTH it’s okay to keep up the hype? No. I think Ewha women are massively intelligent and wonderfully stylish. As an Ewha alumna, of course I think that, just as I think UCLA is the best university bar none. However, I don’t need to believe that anyone else is less than because they didn’t get into or chose not to attend Ewha and just as I might boo or hiss at the mention of USC in jest, but I realize it’s not a bad university either.

Why stir up bullshit and perpetuate what is essentially an urban myth? Sure, there are uber-fashionable girls at Ewha but I still don’t think they’re any more fashionable than girls across the road at Yonsei no matter what they say.

Still, let’s stick to what I said. I didn’t say “classic femininity” as a way of talking about a way to be feminine or anything like that.

What I said was a “classically feminine LOOK” in clear reference to the clothes that were being worn in the 50’s and 60’s and no longer being worn as much by the 70’s. And all this started well before this post, with the NYT article I referred to above talking about the same thing.

So, at this point, I think people are saying I said things in their comments, people are responding to that, and getting farther away from any claims I made in the actual article. I don’t make any claims about “femininity” or what’s more proper or preferable. Please read what I said and in the context it was written — talking about a certain style of clothing, not about who is more or less a woman, who is more or less “womanly” in any essential sense.

I used “classic” in the sense that it is often used in fashion, which is a euphemism for “older” styles. That’s it. And if you look at the context, it’s clear I’m not making any broader claims.

I think that to claim I am making any of these broader claims, with the context of the article and my several explanations, is bending over backwards to read something that isn’t there. And as I have said before, if there is any subtle value judging or bias to the article, it’s in the direction of saying the “West” — which I don’t actually focus on explicitly as such very much in the article — doesn’t dress like this because of a higher level of gender equality, which a link I clearly made from the git-go in this article.

So to say this is somehow coming down hard on “Western” women or that it is somehow wagging a finger at them perplexes me.

As for the Ewha thing, let’s also remember that this wasn’t in the article, and was just a side comment: “Or how 9 AM in front of Ewha front gate is jokingly called a “fashion runway” by many, because of the clop, clop, clop of high heels and girls trying to outdo each other in terms of dress.”

One might debate as to why, but don’t blame me for this image — it was there far before I mentioned it, and I actually learned it AT Ewha while I was teaching there, from some students who were joking about it. This image is pervasive in Korean society, as is that of the “Ewha girl” — most famously joked about in the movie “Tajja”, in which, upon the main character being arrested, she protests, “But I went to Ewha!” Don’t kill the messenger — the image is there, and I didn’t make it up for the first time here.

I’ll be the first to admit that Ewha is no more or less formal than any Korean university, but the front gate, which I have also stood outside of as a photographer, is peculiarly narrow, and at 9 AM is the place to be in terms of who’s wearing what. It has that reputation, and that image is iconic for Koreans, so I made mention here in the conversation. If that causes offense to Ewha alums, I apologize.

Still, many Ewha women themselves take pride in being associated with being seen as more fashionable (as well as intelligent and many other things) than other women’s universities, particularly Sookmyeong, its rival. When I was standing out the front gate and telling women that I was doing a story about new fall fashions, and we were doing an “Ewha vs. Sookmyeong” concept, many of the girls there jokingly boasted of how “country” those girls were and how Ewha was clearly the best.

Still, if I want to know what young women are wearing in the fall, I stand outside the Ewha main gate there 1) because it’s a women’s university, so automatically twice as many people are going to women, 2) because everyone is funneled through that narrow space, which in the morning sounds like an army of heels is passing, and 3) because it’s “Ewha.”

And in my estimation, I think there’s a broad representation of styles and stylish people there, and I do think it’s different from other places. As a photographer, it’s a shooting gallery, as most of the school walks by you in the space of a couple hours. I can’t think of a single better place to shoot than there, and perhaps it’s just the layout, but I think that’s part of where Ewha gets it’s reputation, which I didn’t make up out of thin air here.

By the way, we never ran with the “Ewha vs. Sookmyeong” story, because it was so hard to get a lot of Sookdae girls to agree to go on film. For some reason, it was easy as pie at Ewha. We did several pics from in front of Ewha last year, and many girls were eager to pose, some of whom you can see in our Ewha category (referring to the neighborhood, not just the school). And the pictures there were mostly casual and cool, actually, as you can see here and here and here.

But we’re gonna run with the concept full on this year, and I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun, and a good way to showcase both schools and let shine a bit of school pride. Clearly, neither Ewha nor Sookmyeong is going to “win”, as no one wants to put down anyone, but it’s a nice concept for a story, and it will come out to a amicable tie, clearly.

And as for the Ewha girls vs. non roaming around the campus, that’s exactly why I don’t shoot there on weekends. I think the level of true stylishness drop a notch, as the many people who come to Ewha with some weird sense of what that means differ from what I think actual Ewha students know is actually going on in their school.

Personally, I think Ewha girls — the self-consciously fashionable ones — are more fashionable than at other schools I’ve taught or shot at. Stereotypes aside, that’s what I’ve found when actually walking around the campus with a camera. Yonsei is a good place to go, too. As is Waedae. Not so much Kodae or Kyunghee or other places I’ve gone that aren’t as high profile. That’s just what I’ve found.

And still, if another photographer asked me where to shoot for female fashion trends, I’d still say to stand in front of Ewha’s front gate from 8:30–9:30 on a weekday morning. If you want a high ratio of well-dressed college women to put on film, that’s the place. I can’t think of a better place, whether it’s bcs of the layout, the reputation, or what have you. It’s still the best, photographically. And I don’t think most Ewha women would find that insulting, since that’s the rationale I gave to actual Ewha students who agreed to pose in the pictures.

“I like how Ewha has been brought up in the conversation, because I lived and went to school there for 2 years. There are a lot of myths that are circulated about that school and it’s demographics, none of which ring any more true than they do for any other female college student in Korea. Sadly, a lot of these myths have been passed down through Korean society so many times that even young Ewha students believe they are automatically more fashionable or elite than students of other schools. They eventually learn otherwise. ”

Thank you. Again, I’m an Ewha alumna. I was there for two years too and there is no fashion show at the front gate any more than there is one at the front gate of any other major Korean university. There are some fashionable girls walking by, no doubt, but no one seems to notice the other sorts of Ewha women passing by like the Ewha jocks clad in sweats with not a stitch of make-up and their hair cut short or the studious Ewha bookworms who are bespectacled and dressed down.

Plus, let me tell you this. A lot of those girls tip-toeing around the front gate area aren’t Ewha students anyway. I could tell an Ewha student from just by how they reacted to me. Ewha students rarely blink twice upon seeing a foreign face.

At best, this style of dress is more “stereotypical femininity” than “classic femininity”. “Classic” adds a overtone or connotation of setting a bar and that implies that other forms of femininity and fashion choices are less than.

I myself quickly found out that the description “men do not wear shorts” was absolute here in 1994. When I wore them, I was stared at, and I realized that no Korean men — not a single one — was wearing shorts in public situations not outside the vicinity of one’s house. Or sandals — no one wore them, they didn’t exist. I had a pair of Birkenstocks, and I knew several Americans walking around in Tevas, which were popular in the US and Europe at the time; children stopped to stare at us, whether in Seoul or the provinces — back then, there were certain things you wore, and certain things you didn’t. Funny thing was, the very next year, sandals came “in.” And everyone wore them. From 1995, they were OK.

Point is, I know that Korea is changing, and changing fast — and that “old-fashioned” kind of dress used to be nearly the only kind. People forget, but there were no bright colors (what Koreans call too “화려해” or “colorful/bright/flashy”), most women wore variations of black/white/gray as a base, and showing your shoulders was STILL cause for stares or even getting your shoulders slapped in the Seoul subway; the ability to show off tattoos or nose/brow piercings is still a shock to me, since anyone — especially a woman — would be absolutely shunned if you showed up with a tat back in the 90’s.

So, to me, this “demure” fashion is fascinating not just because it’s “demure” but also how it is a mix of what would have been considered “racy/flashy” back then: these dresses are “demure” by the standards today, but the patterns and colors are bold, the hemlines are much, much shorter than they would have been 15 years ago, and yet they are still considered “얌전해.”

The standards are shifting, but as true Korean fashion goes, I find this to be the most enduring identifiable style extant for Korean women and an essential part of “traditional” in the sense that many Koreans conceive of the word, which is much more “East vs. West” and “Confucian vs. modern” than I ever meant.

In terms of the most “proper” dress for Korean women (which already exists in a “new”, Western sense), within a “traditional” sense of propriety for women — let me make clear here that I do not advocate this as a way for all women to be, but I am simply describing what I think Korean people are thinking about — quiet, humble, non-assertive, and deferential all go into the definition of the “얌전한 여자” and that is matched by a “얌전한” type of fashion that such women would be expected to wear.

That being said, I find it fascinating that the latter definition is shifting (“얌전한” clothing) even in relation to the static image of the former (얌전한 여자), and even when those norms are broken, it’s interesting to see frills and bows and things tacked onto clothing that would not at all be considered “얌전해”, but it still seems like even a lot of “sexy” clothes seem to have to reference it, or that even “얌전한” clothes seem to be venturing into the area of “sexy.”

In any case, my point here isn’t to categorically judge anyone, but to try to make sense of what I consider to be a truly Korean style that is, like all other aspects of fashion here, quickly changing with the times.

And this lively conversation, in forcing me to check my definitions and explain myself more fully, has really helped me think through this style, which I find very difficult to describe in English, or to even describe. But I know it’s there, and I’m trying.

P.S. I’ve put in a footnote to the original post to help clarify what I mean by “demure.” Thanks to all for exchanging opinions. This is what makes blogging fun!

I know there are a few North American women who might read this and say, ‘oh I’m not in the majority of badly dressed, frumpy American women’ and good for you, but you also can probably agree that is some truth in what everyone is saying, as much as your own opinion rings true here, because this is mainly just a matter of backgrounds and personal experiences, and things are going to be different where you’re from, what gender you are, etc.
I have been all over the world, and I do think Korean women have a particular penchant for traditional womens clothing. The clothes don’t make the man, or woman, in this case; it’s just clothing, and a front for femininity.
I like how Ewha has been brought up in the conversation, because I lived and went to school there for 2 years. There are a lot of myths that are circulated about that school and it’s demographics, none of which ring any more true than they do for any other female college student in Korea. Sadly, a lot of these myths have been passed down through Korean society so many times that even young Ewha students believe they are automatically more fashionable or elite than students of other schools. They eventually learn otherwise. Yonsei and Ewha are back to back, and when you’re standing at the scramble in Shinchon on an afternoon, you can’t tell Ewha students apart from female Yonsei students, unless they’re carrying the green planner or a logo folder. The only thing Ewha students really do differently that fulfills the myths is the graduation photos, which still don’t do anything for their personal style.

And again, the example of the “sexy” end of “demure” was to show that even revealing clothing is often done up with poofiness, frills, bows, and what would be considered “girly” or “demure” accouterments in other contexts

Also, I don’t say this style isn’t in “the West” at all, but that more people wear it here, more often. That’s it. This is why I totally agree with you here:

“Also, it’s fine to document what’s being worn but, again, where the problems occur is when you’re contrasting it to the Western approach which is much more functional. A woman in Manhattan or San Francisco simply isn’t going to bother with some frilly get up to run errands. A woman in those areas is going to look at a pair flats as adoringly as she’d look at a pair of pumps; and she’d choose the flat or pump according to what she was doing for that day or evening.

In contrast, Korea is a place where you have women trying to wear pumps and expensive accessories to a picnic or to the beach. So, yeah, you’re not going to get the same numbers of women dressed like this because women in those places don’t see a need to dress that way. Maybe our mothers and grandmothers did, but we don’t. ”

Agreed 100%. It’s a matter of numbers, not that no one does it at all over there, or that everyone necessarily does it here.

And in the article above, I used the term “classically feminine” to try to describe what is very hard to describe, but since I started the article talking about the 50’s and 60’s in the US, and that look being largely abandoned in the 70’s when women’s fashion, as I think you’d agree diversified and inevitably, became more casual as fashion began to take comfort into account more — that’s what I was referring to. I wasn’t at all advocating the Korean “way” to be “feminine” — as in the only or proper way to “be” a woman.

Actually, I don’t see why this is so controversial, since I’m not talking about broad definitions of “femininity” at all, but clearly about frills, ribbons, and bows, and the whole line of thinking about this actually started in this post, which was a response to what the New York Times was talking about as the “return” of this style of dress in their article “The Newly Uptight”. My whole line of thinking about this was the response that, in Korea at any rate, this look never really “left” and has only recently NOT been mainstream Korean mode, and one doesn’t have to be “uptight” to wear it.

Which is why less conservative young women in their 20’s think of this “demure” style as “old-fashioned”, even as more conservative dressers tend to be the ones keeping this genre of dress very much alive here.

But as a trend, hot pants, for example, are a clear trend that happened this summer, more than any other. All the fashion news are abuzz about it, and if you look around the streets, they were everywhere this summer in a way they weren’t other summers. However, clearly, not all Korean women are wearing hot pants, and none of the 20-something women in the office I work at would ever be caught dead in them. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a trend, though.

Same with “demure dresses” — it’s my estimation that it’s a solid genre among Korean women’s clothing, and it’s been this way because of a couple factors I already outlined.

That’s really all I’m saying.

I’m not doubting your roomie, or the groups of people you know, nor am I saying that all Korean women wear something, or that all Western women don’t — or that these tendencies mean one is in any way better than the other.

Also, it’s fine to document what’s being worn but, again, where the problems occur is when you’re contrasting it to the Western approach which is much more functional. A woman in Manhattan or San Francisco simply isn’t going to bother with some frilly get up to run errands. A woman in those areas is going to look at a pair flats as adoringly as she’d look at a pair of pumps; and she’d choose the flat or pump according to what she was doing for that day or evening.

In contrast, Korea is a place where you have women trying to wear pumps and expensive accessories to a picnic or to the beach. So, yeah, you’re not going to get the same numbers of women dressed like this because women in those places don’t see a need to dress that way. Maybe our mothers and grandmothers did, but we don’t.

And, I’m glad you acknowledge that a lot of Korean women agree that the look you’re discussing is, in most cases, frumpy. I was much more impressed when I was in Russia because a lot of Russian women wear lovely dresses and skirts and aren’t afraid to use color.

I just think making broad comparative statements about femininity is going to set people on edge because femininity isn’t just about fashion choices.

BTW, the last time I was in Paris, which was for a month, I didn’t see anything close to this look. In Paris, there are stylish women who dress in a myriad of ways. This look you’re documenting, in contrast, if fairly uniform across the board.