WOOYOUNGMI Spring-Summer 2025 – Paris Fashion Week
The American-born Korean fashion brand WOOYOUNGMI unveiled their new Spring-Summer 2025 collection for Paris Fashion Week. The collection was showcased in the historic building of Collége Des Bernardins, which mirrored WOOYOUNGMI’s minimalist designs.
In pursuit of opportunity, South Koreans have emigrated to America for over a hundred years. From plantation labourers who settled there in the early twentieth century to the students inhabiting its universities from the Mid-Century onwards, the cross-cultural community has birthed the contemporary archetype known as the ABK: the American-born Korean. Through a South Korean lens, they embody the wardrobes of American lifestyles: the sporty prep of the Ivy League, the laid-back cool of California and Hawaii as well as the Western heartlands casual country energy.
Wooyoungmi expands the idea of the ABK into liberal exploration of the style domains shared by the two cultures for Spring-Summer 2025. These include the collegiate prep, yuppie sartorialism, surfer bohéme, baseball uniform and the agricultural utility. By observing the historical nature of the source material through Wooyoungmi’s forward thinking Seoulite mentality, it evolves to into a conversation between the past and the future; the technological and the hand-spun. The collection being created with South Korean hand-executed craftsmanship, makes it Madame Woo’s most artisanal to date.
An idea of Far-East Asian cowboys were a source of inspiration for the brand’s Spring-Summer 2025 collection, a lean silhouette being nipped at the waist with cummerbunds cinched with the crisscrossed lacing of early baseball jackets. The sensibility of the game’s uniform travels through the collection, manifesting itself in laced suede jackets and denim or suede waistcoats, cotton baseball suits, knitted varsity jackets, cotton baseball logo tops, laced cowboy gaiters and structured baseball trousers and shorts in leather, cotton, suede or denim. A South Korean touch being added across a satin baseball jacket by a hand-painted WYM logo drawn in the style of seoye calligraphy.
A sense of the wild, wild East takes place in the slender durable workwear suits and cargo trousers in denim or drill, knitted polo-shirts, topstitched denim suits, plaid shirts and bojagi shirts constructed according to the South Korean art of tying knots. The feeling triggers a desire for the crafty and organic explored through the graphic and minimal sensibility of Wooyoungmi. Such as the magnified wooden surfer necklaces hand-painted with the orbital WYM logos, knitted surfer beanies, woven leather loafers, knotted mixed-material trainers, hand-crocheted dresses, shorts and tops, jackets and coats veiled in netting as well as knitted dresses deceptively sliced up with graphic V-shapes.
Focus on the detail; The Great Plains of South Korea are immortalised in tapestry trucker suits and bags woven in the image of an ancient South Korean landscape painting. By projecting this rootsy atmosphere into the future, a zigzag graphic informed by the geometry of historical South Korean patchwork is drawn by hand to produce a futuristic yet organic form. The motif appears throughout the Spring-Summer 2025 collection on reversible blousons, nylon bombers, surfer tops, poplin shirts, lining, bags as well as cummerbunds. Its light sense of sci-fi – an element infused consistently in garments, echoed in the hi-tech appearance of speed-inducing Oakley sunglasses.
On its Korean-American travels through time, the proposal observes the formal yet relaxed yuppie tailoring of the ABK businessman, underlined by shirts and neckties. Transformed through the bohemian attitude of Wooyoungmi’s Spring-Summer 2025 collection, it materialises in billowing silk suits and coats. Ceremonial but simple, they are being constructed with the sensibility of oriental temple cloths. The sentiment is cemented in the sampling of monastic singing bowls on the show’s soundtrack composed freely in the spirit of the South Korean Mantra of Light, by using elements from all around the world.
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