tales from Korea

The Korean female figure is elegant. Woman in Korea have been described by some as the most beautiful in Asia. I can see the appeal, but I can’t really relate to most of them as some other men do. This is not painting all Korean women with the same brush, not by any means. My problem is the type of woman JaYeon and I have resorting to naming simply “Posh girls”. They may not even be that rich, but they’ll do whatever it takes to fit in with the norm of fashion and style. Koreans love being fashionable, they have embraced branding and trends more than any other country I’ve been too. As they’ve taken the American economic model, I guess this was going to happen, but maybe even more of an extent thanks to Korean mentality. This acute awareness of fashion and trends, to me, just makes everyone look pretty much the same. You can see when something becomes popular, and suddenly everyone from the kool kids to the elegant female office worker is right on it. The posh girls in particular, wear high heels as regular shoes and take around compact and ludicrously expensive Prada/Gucci bags. But high heels are the ‘thing’ – they use them to do everything. Since coming to Korea, I’ve already seen three high heel related accidents:

1. An attractive looking posh lady walking down the stairs in Dunkin Donuts, her heel doesn’t land properly on the step – her foot slides to the left and she falls head first down the last 5 hard steps. I offered to help her up but she stumbled off in embarrassment. I guess not that posh anymore.
2. A woman gets her heel stuck in a sidewalk drain grate. It’s well jammed – she pulls so hard the shoe breaks – her expensive heel is now swimming in gunk 15 meters below the service. Not so posh anymore.
3. A woman is on a walking trail, on a mountain, in heels. Yes, idiotic. Even more so then the usual posh heel wearer. She tries to climb over some rocks and falls in a heap. Not so posh anymore I think.

Maybe it’s the lack of individualisation and customisation that we’re use to in the west that bothers me so much. In Korean Confucianistic mentality, they all must “fit in”, and this is the way for people to show off how successful they are by being able to afford expensive clothes as well as being ‘with it’ – knowing the fashion. Some women spend an entire months pay, or more, to get a new handbag from Gucci or a new set of heels from whomever else. The fact that most single people stay with their parents until they get married means they have more of a disposable income to spend on fashion. I don’t want to sound overly critical; there are many Korean women who do like to bend the norms – usually the teen generation. There are particular styles from Japan that have caught on, and in the future it’s likely more subcultures will develop as Korea becomes more multicultural. I like many clothes on offer too, but I work on a different style of priorities, with purpose and comfort coming before style. I just wish the high heel wearers would think about that occasionally, particularly when hiking in the mountains.