By Kevin Naulls
Enter Seoul, a city that revels in style risks.
pushBUTTON
Imagine the brightest, sweetest-looking confection in an Italian bakery around Easter, and then imagine it on your body. pushBUTTON designer Seunggun Park’s striking colour palettes, translucent fabrics and pop-art prints are whimsical, humorous and completely unlike anything we’ve seen before. The rocket popsicle-print dress is hands-down our favourite print.
KYE
Korean brand Kye also has its 1990s game on lock, especially obvious in its prints. What’s fresh about Kye is its take on proportion—big billowy jackets, sweaters and pants featuring futuristic, Illuminati-friendly graphics. Together this creates a genderless, amorphous silhouette we don’t see very often in North America
Unbounded Awe
Attention typeface nerds: Unbounded Awe textiles use unconventional letter branding—kerning and tracking rules have disappeared; conventions of alignment have been overturned—as embellishment, not logo. Naomi Klein would dig it. We definitely do.
87MM
87MM celebrates slacker lifestyle with boxy denim shorts, tanks and tees for the elegantly lax. Some pullovers and rugby shirts from their collaboration with 1987 studio seem befitting of Bill and Ted too, in the 90s surfer-dude kind of way.
Juun.J
Having worked with Lady Gaga, Juun J is currently the cool kid of South Korean fashion brands. Its graphic neoprene sweatshirts, jersey tops with window cut-outs and cropped football jerseys are marketed as menswear but are unconventional enough to be unisex.