A truly popular endeavor

A young paepi middle school student who makes her own glasses accessories and will open an online shop of her goods poses for the camera in Hongdae. Between her haircut, retro glasses, sukajan jacket, retro jeans, socks, and old-school shoes, she is a good channeller of the Korean "boko" retro trend. / Courtesy of Michael Hurt

By Michael Hurt

There is a tendency to dismiss fashion and its concerns as superficial, trivial, and in the end, inconsequential.

There is also the sense that fashion ― especially "street fashion" ― is too squarely located in the market itself, too near the ground, and hence too unfocused through the more evolved critical faculties of society's cultural elites or well-connected aesthetes.

And in that sense, street fashion is too unruly, too uncontrolled, and too unfocused to really make any real sense of. All of these things seem to be true if a look at most of the existing work on Korean popular culture is any guide, which is exactly why a look at street fashion, especially in the historically layered, compressed development-turbocharged, culture industry-driven petri dish that defines South Korea is a crucial necessity at this point in the conversation about Korean "popular culture."

If one is to speak meaningfully of popular culture in the theoretical, academic sense, it is important to note that the "K-pop" and "K-cinema" incarnations of Korean popular culture are difficult to describe as such, given how little most of these fields' manifestations are rooted in the work and workings of everyday people.

Along the lines of how Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described the "culture industry," the "K-pop" and other commercial, corporate formations in the economy are best described as mere simulations of natural, popular cultural formations, more than entities that are an organic part of society themselves.

As windows into the workings of the lived reality of everyday people, as a peek into the content of their social norms and values, a close look at the specific cultural products in these fields are not especially revelatory in themselves; rather, the more useful way of looking at these formations of capital production is in terms of the responses and forms of engagement they engender from normal people.

Which is why the study of various fandoms is important and has accelerated and intensified in the way theorists such as Stuart Hall would find critically useful to the study of "popular culture."

And this is exactly why Korean street fashion and its constituent paepi are important as social phenomena to theorize. Because, of all the things worthy of the attention of the Cultural Studies academician that fall within the realm of even the widest definition of "popular culture," street fashion is the most truly organic and naturally-evolved realm of linked social actions that aren't controlled by a very monied and interested few.

The field of Korean street fashion includes no political/governmental motivations to subsume this truly popular endeavor into the nationalist frame through the use of the "K" signifier.

Far too much academic effort has been made to rationalize the appending of a K-prefix to words describing popular social phenomena, with little thought given to the inherent contradiction of studying the predations of political interests or the concatenations of capital as actual "popular" culture.

Simply put, the product of these formations are popular in their consumption, but not in their creation. And this limits their utility as a marker of what is really going on in the real world of social action.

What is especially interesting about the street fashion paepi is how they have engaged in linked social actions that have come to define a field unto itself by turning consumption into creation.

And that is the purest sense of how Cultural Studies ur-theorist Stuart Hall might describe the "Special K" signifier often assigned by institutionally-interested parties as the ultimate marker of top-down, oppressive, culturally exploitative power, whereas the much more organic, bottom-up, truly popular social formation signified by the self-created term "paepi" ― by the Signified themselves ― would mark the proper regard ― and theoretical approach ― to the serious consideration of the vibrant, sartorially-oriented community that has formed among South Korean youth.

Such serious consideration should be a matter of course, given their status not as a mere "subculture" or "tribe," but as a "scene" of sartorial staging of consumption-as-creation, the likes of which the world has never seen.

As those on the inside of it know, "paepi" is an aspirational term, category, and even lifestyle, marked by conspicuous consumption and sartorial display as a way of self-expression through consumptive acts, and is a truly bottom-up way of being more than just a passive consumer, a mindless vessel of capitalism , or just another lemming following the herd.

Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul.