How a creative army of micro producers drive Korean street style and influence fashion’s direction
Koreans call it bo-se – no-brand, original clothing churned out on the cheap by small producers who respond to the latest trends by making edgy looks that sell out quickly
One of the main problems with understanding Korean fashion – or pretty much any field of Korean popular culture – is the unique historical factors that underlie the things people outside Korea find so interesting.
There have been attempts to explain this, such as last year’s documentary Counterfeit Culture: A Look Inside Korea’s Fake Fashion World, made by fashion website Highsnobiety, but it shed barely any light on the history of Korean fashion and textiles. Yet this background is key to understanding the country’s industrial development.
There would be no K-pop without cultural appropriation. Is that bad?
Such thinking has led to Korea’s “counterfeit culture” being considered a hindrance to the progress of its street fashion culture and the fashion industry, instead of it being acknowledged as the driver of Korean fashion culture, trend sensitivity, and the many looks coming out of Seoul and Seoul Fashion Week, which ended on Saturday.
Without an understanding of the bo-se (pronounced “bo say”), which means no-brand, clothing industry in South Korea, it is impossible to understand Korean street fashion.
The term bo-se originally referred to the import of raw fabrics into the bonded areas of Korean textile operations that turned out manufactured goods such as Gap tops and Nike trainers.
The “bo” (a Sino-Korean term for “protected” or “bonded”) and “se” (for “tax” or “tariff”) came to refer to the items that “fell off the back of a truck” or were illicitly copied from client orders. These items then ended up on the black market for a fraction of the original price.
