Developing a base for global fashion in Korea: how a budding fashion industry emerged from a big business-driven economy

Abstract

This paper traces Korea’s evolution as a low-end apparel and garment manufacturing location into a regional fashion hub. Studying this history reveals, however, a curious anomaly of Korea’s trajectory within global fashion despite its growing visibility as a regional fashion hub, that is the notable absence of individually-influential “creative class” (designers) and an industrial agglomeration that assists localized innovation and creativity, often cited as crucial factors in enhancing a fashion city’s competitiveness. How did Korean fashion achieve this region-wide popularity in the absence of global designers, and to some extent even noteworthy Korean fashion brands? How does the contrast to other developing fashion systems, mainly the Chinese case? Drawing on market share data, interviews with Korean and Chinese fashion industry workers, and business and industry records, this paper traces the segmented development of the Korean fashion system, dominated by the chaebol on one-hand and traditional market actors on the other. We argue that these bifurcated developments reflect the legacy of the country’s larger industrial organization, particularly, the concentrated and segmented industrial system and chaebol-dominance, which developed alongside early garment and apparel manufacturing. The subsequent developments in Korean fashion continue to be shaped by this system now in the forms of domineering fashion empires that operate in opposition to the predominant model presented by global creative systems. We illustrate how Korea defies expectations of conventional theories of fashion hierarchies and discuss the possibilities and limits this exception pose to Korea’s further rise into a fashion capital.