3 Ms of Korean street fashion

By Michael Hurt

This time around, I'm going to do something unusual by applying grade school math to the process of choosing subjects to represent the totality of Korean social (and sartorial) reality. This is because documenting the Korean street fashion culture is essentially ethnography (close, anthropological studies of people), and faces the same set of bias/sampling concerns that sociologists face. For it is essentially sociology you're doing if you're doing ethnographic portraiture, which is essentially what true street fashion photographers who grab people in the wild, are doing.

The "mean" is the "average" are terms most people are used to, as the "mean" is what you get when you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers. The "median" is the "middle" value of a list of numbers. To find the median, your numbers have to be listed in numerical order from smallest to largest, so you may have to rewrite your list before you can find the median. The "mode" is the value that occurs most often. If no number in the list is repeated, then there is no mode for the list. (from Purple Math)

But obviously, the ethnographic pursuit of taking people off the streets who just happen to be there is not a mathematical one; but we can take conceptual cues from math to understand what we're doing.

First of all, the mean is pretty much the average, within a given set of values, say the people you can see on the street. But how do you take the average in the social sense? It's hard. But here's one thing I do know.

The street fashionista at Seoul Fashion Week do not look like the average person on the Korean street who exist in socially normal places, from most coffee shops or even universities, or in neighborhoods as fairly mundane as Jongno all the way down to Gangnam, or even Hongdae ― if you just stand there and look at ALL people passing by. They are simply not in the majority. I think if we take the mathematical metaphor further, we can agree that these people occupy a "higher" place in the hierarchy of the ideas of "fashionable" or "interesting." They're not in the majority. Most people don't dress this way ― anywhere. Common social sense tells us that these people are outliers, statistically speaking. And they're outliers who reside on the upper end of the sartorial hierarchy.

And there's a selection issue here. In that they're not statistically representative, such subjects are surely possessed of some kind of specialness that makes them interesting as examples of Korean street fashion, right? Well, since I chose these subjects, I'll explain my logic thusly:

First, they're wearing trend items that occur (to my knowledge) in higher frequency in Korea, and/or are produced in Korea.

Secondly, they're (subjectively and aesthetically speaking) interesting and colorful pieces of clothing that define (often by slightly breaking) Korean social norms of dress and even gender, which I think says something about Korean society in general.

Thirdly, they're willing to pose, since they're a self-selecting group of people whom many would call "paepi" (portmanteau word for "fashion people" in Korean pronunciation of the English words) who generally want to be photographed.

So, inevitably, if you want to know what Korean people are actually wearing, and possibly why, or even what it all means, you have to think about the selection bias of the investigator. And that goes not only for weird academics like me who look at street fashion as an inherently social, communicative series of acts, but at all the other investigators in the field, who themselves are often engaged in carrying out their own quite specific agendas (e.g. showing the "best" street fashion in Korea or proving how "good" Korean street fashion is now vis-a-vis comparisons to other countries' putative street fashions).

But yes, the sartorial and aesthetic choices of extremely unusual, super-fashionable, social outliers DO tell us something about Korea. What these outliers wear occurs in high frequency within a certain group of people who call themselves "paepi." In that sense, I thought her important to catch, since her particular set of items define a pretty high frequency, the mode, of these items (values) appearing in the population. It's an example of something I as the investigator am arguing to be representative of a certain, gendered, Korean social trait.

But I think we can identify one potential problem with street fashion as a practice of ethnographic, visual investigation. By choosing subjects that generally appear in certain places that themselves are quite special, peculiar social spaces, we are often taking the most statistically non-representative members of the population and assigning them more weight in specific ways that are functions of a specific, overall agenda. Which isn't necessarily a problem, but let's at least think about the agendas that most affect what it is we think we know ― and are representing ― as Korean social and sartorial reality.

See, my project as an academic and a photographer (visual ethnographer) is "keeping it real." Of course, as I have other, more journalistic agendas, my focus may shift, but I generally try to keep to the goal of trying to look at clothing not as objects of interest in and of themselves, which I think leads to the same mistake of fetishizing the clothing as material objects and engaging in the same consumptive relationship with them as the subjects I study. If I am in the thrall of the same Warenfetischismus ("commodity fetishism") as my subjects, and was simply using my camera as my way of engaging with clothing, I'd have no critical distance from the subject such that I could see the forest for the trees anymore.

And that's the big point ― knowing where you are, the limitations (and imperatives) of one's agenda, which allows one to bound the nature of one's claims and assumptions while asking more interesting questions. And getting more interesting subjects. Oh, and knowing how to think of them when you do have them.

The super trendy item these days, which I first spied a few months ago but didn't know what was going on: the garter-skirt, ladies and gentlemen. I was surprised to see it on the study weekend before midterms week two semesters ago on the Kyunghee University campus, but there she was. And after stopping her, getting permission to photograph, then interview her, she turned out to be a student from my former university, an English Literature major with stunningly superb English, in fact.

In this case, I knew the field well enough to take someone who superficially looked fairly conservative but had marked herself as possessed of enough socio-sartorial transgressiveness that her example could be the center of quite an interesting conversation about social expressiveness, gender norms, and sexuality. When taken to the next level of a semi/unstructured ethnographic interview, that's when a lot of interesting things came into view, including the name of the fashion trend item itself.

My knowledge of the terrain allows me to know that this young lady falls somewhere within the mean — someone well within the farthest extremes of demure-sexy, conservative-transgressive, reserved-risqué, oe even formal-casual. Yet, since I've seen that particular trend item pop up regularly enough to recognise it as a pattern, I know it defines a mode. It's not what everyone is wearing, nor is it a norm in terms of what many kinds of people are wearing. But using interviews and the social interactions required to take a photographic portrait helps me define the kind of person who generally defines a particular mode of dress.

This is how I used my coup d'œil, or knowledge of the terrain, to zoom in on useful ethnographic data as expressed through specific subjects, around things I want to know about, namely the boundaries of the definition of the paepi, the changing terrain of street fashion culture, and even how some of the younger generation even defines itself via new sets of social norms.

Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. The whole article with more photos is available on The Korea Times' website. Contact kuraeji@gmail.com.