지금 SFAA의 첫날의 패션쇼에서 촬영 끝났는데 오늘은 RUBINA의 사진을 많이 올릴께요. 기대하세요!

We just finished shooting at the first day of the SFAA show, and will be uploading today’s star designer RUBINA in just a few hours. Check back here for it!

왠지 이 사진을 너무 좋아해요. 한 순간에 이 흔한 멋진 패션을 너무 눈에 띈 거예요. 왜 이 사진작가로 좋아하냐면 구도, 포즈, 그리고 색깔도 어울리는 거네요. 크림색 가방과 구두 그리고 피부색. 그리고 편한 니트 원피스를 입고 있는데도 이뻐요. 구두도 마찬가지로 편해보이면서도 힐은 좀 높고 발목  에 끈은 아주 살짝 섹시해보이는 거네요. 마지막으로 너무 바쁘게 다니는 거니까 — 통화하면서 분명히 누구를 찾고 있고 볼펜도 목에 달리는 거고 다른 손에 막 서류가 가지고 다니는 것 — 재밌어요. 이란 여자는 진짜 멋진 것아닌가요? 너무 일부러 이쁜 척 안하고 그냥 자연스러운 美를 풍기는 것자체는 너무 쿨인 거예요.

I like this picture a lot. In one instant, it captures so much, especially the more you look at it. As a photographer, I like the composition, pose, and the matching colors. If you look at her bag, shoes, and skin, they match each other with a cream/tan pairing, which stands our against the dark color of her knit minidress. And she’s casual and comfortable, yet dressed up a bit. Her shoes work the same way, as they are obviously comfortable, but they are a bit higher heels than casual would require, and the ankle strap adds just an extra bit of verve that office wear wouldn’t require. And the moment itself is nice — she’s on the phone and obviously coming out of her building to find someone on the street, with the pen around her neck and a stack of papers in her opposite hand. I think it’s a cool shot of a woman who doesn’t have to make an effort to exude a natural kind of beauty, who can look fabulous even when she’s working and not even trying.

우리 “길거리 스타일” 컬럼은 개인의 패션 선택만 벤치마킹 하는 것이아니라, 차라리 대표적인 길거리에서 보일 수 있는 패션 장르를 잡으려고 해요.

“Street Styles” tracks not just individual fashion choices, but tries to capture real Korean fashion that is representative of types of fashion genres visible on the streets of Seoul.

모든 사진을 클릭하시면 크게 확대됩니다.
Click on any image to view at high-resolution.

이번 시즌은 화려하거나 좀 고급스러운 스카프와 목도리, 또 니트의 시대가 됐어요. 그리고 겹쳐 입는 옷 스타일(layered look)도 트렌드이예요.  명동, 이대와 신촌에서 사진을 찍어보니까 이 분명한 사실을 알 수 있어요. 이렇게 안 입는 사람을 입는 사람보다 찾기 힘드네요. ㅋㅋㅋ 여기 명동이고– 20대 중/후반 여성들이 많은 곳.

This season marks the era of the colorful or high-fashion scarves, as well as the reign of knit materials and a serious obssession with layers. I was taking pictures in Myeongdong, Shinchon, and Idae, and it would have been hard to snap someone WITHOUT one of those three things happening.

신촌에서는 대부분 여성들이 나이 조금 더 어리잖아요 — 주로 20대 초반, 중반. 진짜 이 겹쳐 입는 옷 스타일은 인기있네요. 다른트렌드랑.

In Shinchon, the women there tend to cluster around their early-to-mid twenties, and the layered look  definitely reigns supreme, along with other styles.

니트이나 모피 조끼도 인가 짱! 어제 너무 많이 봤네요!

Knit or faux-fur (i hope for faux!) vests were everywhere I looked yesterday.

에대근처에 이 흥미스러운 여자를 만났어요. 많은 유행을 잘 표현하고 있네요.

Then we met the most interesting young lady near Idae. She’s channeling a lot of the prevalent trends in an interesting way.

마지막으로 신촌으로 다시 돌아가는 길에 이 너무 멋진 니트드레스를 입는 여자를 우연히 봤는데 가격은 진짜 믿기 날라울 정도로 싸네요: 35,000원. 핸드메이드인라고 한데. 참. 자료만으로 따져도 35,000줜이 나올 텐데. 정말 괜찮다!

And on the way back to Shinchon, I ran into this woman whose knit dress was a sight to behold. Can you believe it was handmade and only cost her around $30 USD (35,000 KRW)?! I would think that the materials ALONE would cost that much. Loved it!

코디 짱!

Coordinate it, girl!

그냥 한번더…마지막으로 보고 싶어서. 진짜 마음에 든 니트 원피스. 너어어무 좋아!

Oh, I just wanted one last look. Because I loved it. LOVED it!

한국어 번역이 준비중입니다. 기다려주세요.

Our site’s street photography has been selected to be included in an exhibit at Harvard University, put on by a group from the Graduate School of Design. The exhibit is called “Pop! Contemporary fashion and film subcultures in Asia” and in their own words:

…will focus on informal and non-traditional design through explorations of popular culture, cross-disciplinary interactions, and new forms of media. For this exhibit, we will examine the intersection of art, technology, and design through an event focusing on street fashion in a few of the most exciting cities in Asia: Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Hanoi, Dubai, Mumbai, Istanbul and Tehran. We hope to push beyond the formal boundaries of design by exhibiting images and objects collected by bloggers, the social anthropologists of our generation. By mining the work of this geographically diverse group, we hope to convey to our audience the rich variety and complexity of urban life across Asia.

Apparently, they choose one representative for each region — and we’re it! We are definitely going to participate, and are flattered to have made the cut in this way. I think I understand what they mean by fashion documentation as “social anthropology” — that’s very much a big element of my approach to street fashion photography. In my mind, it’s about 1) photographically interesting clothes, 2) styles that are somehow either representative or fashionable in themselves, and 3) documenting not just the people but the physical spaces they inhabit, especially as they represent the character of specific neighborhoods in Seoul. I’m glad that some really smart folks out there (our faithful readers are in this category, of course!) seem to value these aspects of our approach to documentation.

When this site was younger, people always asked about the site’s name, our photographic approach, and why I even started it in the first place. I always answered that it was really just an experiment in fetish and photography that I started with no particular place to go. Still, I knew it would take me somewhere interesting; I didn’t plan on taking pictures of feet and legs and whatnot forever. To me, it was like an art project that started with a quirky theme, and would develop into different directions later. I had anough faith in myself as a photographer at that point (2006) to know I’d end up somewhere interesting if I had started somewhere interesting.

This entire project has always been a process, and I consider the entire arc of where we started to where we’ve come an essential part of the story. People have asked me why I haven’t erased the early part of the site — it’s “embarrassing,” they say, or it’s just “foot fetish” stuff. But I ask the question: “What’s embarrassing about being a heterosexual man and finding parts of a woman’s body attractive?”

In terms of the heterosexual “male gaze“, one that supposedly objectifies women into their constituent parts: a beautiful face, graceful neck, supple shoulders, slender arms, delicate hands, ample breasts, hourglass waist, curvaceous hips, firm thighs, and slim and slender legs — if one starts “from the ground up” with attractive feet and heels and moves right back up the ladder, is one somehow a “pervert?” And as a photo experiment that is informed by the legal need to not show people’s faces —  as well as the quirky name and acknowledgment of a “foot fetish” only insofar as women themselves obsess over pedicures, Manolo Blahniks, and how they’d look in this season’s sexy sandals — how is the watcher more “perverted” than the one putting on the show, again?

That’s why I could never erase the first couple months of posts on this site (despite people teasing me for it, or thinking negatively about the name) — because you can’t forget about the past, especially since it’s such an essential part of who we are in the present. And I see it like this — photography with a dash of fetish is far more interesting than the vanilla pictures that increasingly infect the internet. To me, “fetish” is simply “feeling” — and photography with feeling is always better. What you might see in my (FMS) photography is that I simply stopped apologizing for having a “male gaze” and instead admitted that I have one. And then I harnessed it. I used it to find interesting camera angles, to push myself past the natural hesitation people have about approaching total strangers on the street to take pictures, and to flatter the many subjects who want to be objectified, seen as sexy, or thought otherwise attractive.

“But you’re objectifying/sexualizing the subject in that shot!”

Yawn. Yeah, but so would most photographers. I simply admit use the natural instincts that I have to take the picture I want. I’ll rethink it or feel guilty about it or over-analyze it later. In that minute or two I have to take her portrait, I realize that the front slit in her skirt is sort of the point of her look, right? That’s where the eye is drawn, that’s where she wants it to go. Otherwise, why proudly wear such an usual skirt? So let’s look up a bit, let’s have her look down at me, let’s get the bright and colorful lights and reflections in the background, let’s make her look tall and powerful. Crossing her legs actually brings more attention to the fact that there’s something she’s hiding, and me shooting from below surely makes her more cognizant of that fact. There’s an unspoken tension hovering in the picture (between the viewer and the subject) about the fact that, indeed, “X marks the spot.” No, it is no accident that her crotch is smack in the center of the frame. I didn’t think about it when composing or even cropping after-the-fact; it just looked “right” that way. Maybe all this analysis sounds crude, but that’s one of the many things going on photographically in this shot, that’s how photos work, and what makes real photography with “feeling” (or you can say “fetish”) truly fun.

So, again, if you pointed out that it was my heterosexual male gaze that guided the way I set up this shot — good! You get an “A.” And again, this begs the question — So? What is wrong with possessing a heterosexual “male gaze” if indeed, you are (*GASP*) a heterosexual male photographer? That gaze is going to be there anyway — so trying to use it makes for much more honest pictures than artificially (and all too obviously) trying to act as if it’s not there at all. Because you’re going to feel it there, anyway.

So? We’ve come from the “fetish” in FMS photography being taken straight in a shot glass to that hard liquor being mixed in with other concerns: trends, style, and much thought given to the formal aspects of portrait photography, in addition to a little bit of social anthropology.

Since the beginning of Feetmanseoul.com, we’ve also tried to brand ourselves, and that brand has taken on real meaning from the early days when the site’s name was just an inside joke (a variation on a popular expat food blog called “Fat Man Seoul”) and an excuse to play with my new DSLR in 2006 after having abandoned film for digital; now, we’ve claimed the name as signifying “fashion from the ground up” and the Korean meaning of someone who knows many people and places as “having wide feet.” The site’s name now connotes being on one’s feet, out on the street, and having a “beat” that we cover. Whether or not that was there at the beginning, that’s the direction into which we grew.

But it still also harkens back to the original connotation of fetish that a “feetman” would be thought to possess. The way I’ve always explained the street fashion pictures taken by FMS has been in terms of being edgy, about not apologizing for admitting a sexual desire for the subject, for admitting an engagement with objectification in terms of what has Laura Mulvey has famously called “fetishistic scopophilia.” Some prissy folks who turn up their noses and employ the extremely negative term Konglish “페티쉬” (”pe-ti-shi” as a recent term only a few years old and used to describe only a genre of pornography, and eschewing any of the broader meaning as a psychological concept) are rightly picking up on all these things: “Aren’t your pictures too sexy?”

Yep. And that’s what defines the difference between the shots I like as a heavily-spiked cocktail with punch, as opposed to a virgin Gold Medalist that is safe, fruity, and drearily boring. Sure, maybe at the beginning of this site, the FMS pictures were a little too much to drink straight from the bottle and perhaps bit hard to swallow, but we’ve come a long way since then, and seem to be making photographic cocktails that some people obviously like — see, the trick, we’ve found, is in not watering our shit down.

So as we continue to develop content here, we’re going to use this nod of affirmation not to rest on our laurels, but to keep things fresh, edgy, and unapologetic about recording what we like, how we like, for the reasons we like. And as long as we do that while paying attention to the formal and technical aspects of our art, I think we’ll never end up serving saccharine sweet “girly” drinks here without any punch, but stuff that is arresting, powerful, and something you would actually want to serve to your friends.

“Lee Myungbak and Kim Jongil in Secret Summit”

할로윈은 진짜 한국에 왔네요. 5년전이면 일반 한국인들이 ‘할로윈’인지 신경 안쓰고 몰랐을 거예요. 근데 요즘에는 할로윈 행사같은 걸 많이 하고 무서운 귀신이나 그런 테마로 데코레이션을 하는 데 많이 볼 수 있어요. 근데 좀 짜증나게 하는 부분이 어른들이 할로윈을 즐겁게 하는 걸 보면 좋다고 생각하지만 너무 ‘성인’할로윈이 된 것같더라고요. 요즘에 어디서나 할로윈이란 계절이 그냥 야하게 입을 수 있다는 핑계가 된 것같아요. 특히 여자의 복장: ‘섹시 마녀’나 ‘야한 여고생’아니면 ‘불량한 간호사’로 나오는 사람들이 너무 많더라고요. 휴. 좀 창조적으로 합시다! 조금이라도 노력하면 진짜 많은 차이가 나는 거예요.

Halloween has really come to Korea — 5 years ago, you would rarely see Korean nationals putting on costumes — with stores and decorations now lo longer being a rarity. However, Halloween for adults has definitely become too ADULT, especially for women, for seemingly half of whom Halloween has simply become an excuse to be “naughty”, e.g. the “naughty witch” or “naughty schoolgirl” or “naughty nurse.” Yawn. But we were able to spy some truly creative costumes out there over the weekend. We love it when people put in EFFORT. As mom used to say, when you do put in even a little bit of real effort, it shows in the end.

Aaaaaagh! ㅋㅋㅋ

“Ajumma들.”

역시. / Oh, yeah.

조선시대의 양반과 유흥집에서 일하는 섹시한 색시.

Chosun-era gentryman and bar girl.

예쁘라. / Work it, Chosun-style!

우리 패션 일기를 하는 Miss Seonja를 M2의 줄에 우연히 만났는데 친구들이랑 한번 찍었어요. 아직도 많은 한국인들이 완전히 할로윈에 빠진 것보다는 아직도 보수적인 한국 사회에서는 귀여운 머리밴드에 붙여있는 귀나 그런 것까지만 입거나 쓰는 거예요.

We ran into Miss Seonja and her entourage outside M2. Most Korean women are still playing it safe with cute headgear of some type. Halloween is still largely the stuff of foreigners, or Koreans who hang out with foreigners.

한국에서는 재부분 한국인들이 할로윈이 뭔지 알지만 보통 행사로 하는 거예요. 무슨 이벤트같은 것 있으면 직원들이 할로윈 복장을 입는 거나 일반사람들이 아주 간단하게 꾸미는 것같아요. 그리고 아무리 전혀 할로윈 복장을 안 입더라도 할로윈복을 입는 사람들을 보러 온 젊은 애들이 많은 것같아요. 예를들어 이번에 홍대에서는 사람들이 유난히 많았던 것같아요. 밑에 사진에서는 Club Day를 홍보한팀이 있는 거예요.

For most Koreans, Halloween has become the stuff of the “event” — as in promotions, advertising, perhaps some employees dressed up in Halloween-themed items. But now, the holiday is at least recognized as happening that day; and even if many young Koreans themselves don’t dress up, one gets the sense that a lot of people come to Itaewon and Hongdae to watch others dressing up. For example, this year, Hongdae was absolutely packed, and we ran into a group of folks doing a promotion for Club Day.

많은 남자들이 할로윈의 날에 여장하는 거네요. 혹시 복장보다 조금 더 큰 호기심이 있는 것아닌가 싶네요. 미국이든 한국이든 마찬가지로. 그리고 한국방송을 보면 남자들이 맨날 여장하는 것같아요. 한국에서는 호기심이 더 많은 것아닌가요? 하야튼 ‘그녀는 너무 예뻤지?’ ㅋㅋ

There was the obligatory boy-as-girl “costume.” Perhaps it’s the one day when the “real person” can “come out?” She’s pretty, no?

근데 한국인들 중에 정말 창조적인 룩을 하나 봤는데…

We did run into a Korean guy who had one truly crazy costume, though.

“Crazy Freddie Mercury”

Source: Starpulse

진짜 닮았네요. 잘한 것 인정. ‘킬러 프레디 머큐리?’ ㅋㅋㅋ 너무 오리지널하다, 진짜.

I have to admit — that’s pretty good. Freddie Mercury…as a killer? I think that one wins on creativity points alone.

또 다른 우리 패션일기 친구를…Senan! 진짜 우연히 만났단 말이예요. Senan과 남친. 멋지죠? 계속 길거리에서 잘 만든 할로위 복장을 찾아러 다녔죠…

We also ran into Senan — I swear this wasn’t planned! — while making our rounds. And there were more cool costumes, although we had to look hard. I liked the attitude behind this one…

‘미래적 인어공주’ / “Futuristic mermaids”

참. 정말 웃겼어요. 그리고 은색 장갑 — 나이스.

That’s funny. And I loved the gloves. Yep, leave it to the foreigners to go all the way.

이 장면에서는 Spiderman이 Superman을 패배시킨 거다. (박스 오피스에서 한 것처럼…ㅋㅋㅋ)

Spiderman beats Superman (well, at least in the box office, anyway). But this…

“Friar Tuck”

진짜 하드코어. 장난아니야. 정말 몇 개월 후까지 그 할로윈 컨셉의 효과를 느낄 수 있겠다. ㅋㅋㅋ 그리고 뒤에 그 물레바퀴를 좀 봐봐요. 나 똑똑하지롱! ㅋㅋㅋ

Hardcore, dude. Haaaardcore. That Halloween costume’s gonna leave a mark on several months more of his life. Don’t you love the waterwheel? Ain’t I smaht?

그 다음에 신촌에 가서 우리 동창 후배의 King’s Tap이란 빠로 갔는데 (여기는 Facebook 그룹) 아주 재밌는 할로윈 파티를 하고 있었네요. 분위기는 좋고 사람들도 재밌었는데.

Then I went to Shinchon, to The King’s Tap (and here’s the Facebook page), which is a new bar owned by an alumni friend. It’s pretty chill, and they threw a good Halloween party. At which I encountered some cool costumes…

“Sarah Palin”

진짜 가장 꿈찍한 인물이었다. 나한테. 근데 가장 흥미스럽고 제일 사교적인 복장은 바로 이 것. ‘재생’버튼을 누리고…

The scariest of them all! Hehe. This one was pretty funny, and a very social costume. You push play…

그녀는 막 어색하게 ‘로봇’같은 춤을 쳐요. 근데 계속 하니까 좀 썰렁하게 된 순간에 버튼을 누른 사람이 끊기고 싶은 거잖아요. 그때는 ‘아!’란 생각을 들면서 ‘중지’버튼을 누르게 되는 거예요. 참. 재밌네.

And she dances a kinda goofy version of “The Robot” until it gets a bit awkward, at which point you figure out the joke and hit the “STOP” button. I thought it was cute as hell.

김밥. / “Kim bap.”

B-보이. 사실 ‘걸’로 표현해야 되는데. ㅋㅋ

A pimp b-boy (ahem, girl).

또 따른 b-boy의 멤버. 80년대식 라디오까지. 롯데에서 샀다고 했는데. ㅋㅋ

And another member of his crew. Loved the Lotte boombox.