For the past four years, he has been filling his Your Boyhood blog yourboyhood. Any entity, real or virtual, may serve as the subject including inanimate objects, and gender switching is common. Ko, 30, designs T-shirts with clever graphics, but young customers also come to him for his moderately priced tailored pieces.
Needless to say, the place is usually packed. Jain Song was the last show of the day in Seoul on Wednesday. This was the 70th show on the calendar since Friday, and I had seen a little over half of them. Song stood out like a flawless pearl with the first look: a long camel skirt split provocatively up the front with a gaucho yoke and a white blouse with a collar like a neck scarf blowing in a light breeze.
Everything that followed was similarly sleek, mysterious and provocative with plenty of abstract takes on that Seoul obsession, the trench, looking suddenly very womanly.
Dressed in cartoon T-shirts, pink, sparkles, lace, metallic leggings with girlie shorts and anything by Jeremy Scott, they scream in ecstasy at the arrival of each K-pop heartthrob headed for a tour of the front row.
The awards go to the top background songs played on Cyworld, the South Korean popular social networking service. Once you get past the bright-colored girlie girls, what really stands out in Seoul is the chic, bordering on the obsessively refined, look of the Korean young men, from college kids and young professionals in their early 20s to men in their 40s. This season he took mountaineering garb — parkas, striped climbing cords and hiking boots — and paired it with high-end tailoring.
