Seoul Fashion Week Promotes Diversity

The Seoul Fashion Week has been a platform of diversity. Since the inauguration of the Dongdaemum Design Plaza (DDP) in 2012, the Seoul Fashion Week transformed into a stage for various pockets of cultural diversity and hybridity in Korean culture. Many people and projects are in motion, from Instagram models trying to get free, well-shot pictures to gain more followers, to models trying to get discovered, and designers clothing to get more visibility.

The DDP has allowed the merging of social actions and mixtures of uses that would not be possible in traditional single-use-oriented structures. It invites diverse social uses and diverse projects. And within this unique space, the Seoul Fashion Week event has become an attractor for those possessed of a great deal of social alterity and creatively different ideas. Its participants constitute a refreshing departure from the top-down commercial machinations of the big-culture industry style.

Experts say the street fashion culture that drives the 'K-fashion' is very much the result of this progressive, liberalizing shift in the Korean culture and politics, especially as it is driven by social media and increased connection to the world outside Korea. Seoul Fashion Week has rightly been described as 'unique' in terms of its public nature as it receives a great deal of public funding from high school kids to aspiring Instagram models.