Jin-Kyung Park  Panawan Thanommongkol

10.18399/acta.2020.23.2.004

Fashion unisex clothing beauty South Korean modernity women’s consumption

In this paper, we examine the transformation of women’s fashion in 1970s and 80s South Korea by analyzing the images and narratives of unisex clothing in print media. During the industrialization, modernization, and Westernization of South Korean society in the postwar period, women’s fashion underwent tremendous change. Korean society witnessed women’s daily clothes shifting from traditional hanbok 韓服 to simplified Western clothes (kansobok 簡素服) to unisex/androgynous styles. Fashion items such as pantalons, jeans, shirts, tailored jackets and suits, casual office wear, and neckties, conventionally identified as men’s wear, became wardrobe choices for women. One explanation for this is that these changes took place as a result of the influence of South Korean state policy and the national reconstruction movement to simplify women’s dress codes for the sake of economization. However, a closer investigation of the narratives of unisex clothing reveals the impact of feminist movements, a robust youth culture, and young women’s own desire to achieve gender equality and active social participation. Women’s choice of unisex styles came to be viewed as “the era of de-feminized culture: shock of daughters” (t’al yǒsǒng munhwa sidae: ttaltŭl ŭi ch’unggyŏk). There was increased social pressure to reinforce the existing gender-binary system in the face of gender-blurring styles or what was seen as the masculinization of women. Women’s cultural expressions of power, freedom, consumer choices, and modernity, nonetheless, became manifested through their fashion choices. By shedding light on the emergence of unisex clothing in South Korean modernity, this study ultimately seeks to undermine our view of the West as the epicenter of fashion and beauty and urges us to imagine alternative histories and spaces of fashion and bodily aesthetics.