In a secret location just outside Seoul, a metal fence stretches across a sprawling field, where hundreds of shirts, pants, hoodies, bags, and dresses are laid out like sunbathing vacationers. Over the course of a couple of months, the sustained force of the South Korean sunlight will cause each garment to fade, creating idiosyncratic sun-bleached patterns that designer Jiyong Kim has made his signature.
“We see the transformations created by time itself as part of the design,” says Kim, who is 35 and based in Seoul. After founding the JiyongKim brand in 2021, while studying at London’s Central Saint Martins (sometimes remotely, due to Covid), Kim’s clothes are now stocked in 18 stores globally. And this season, they will be shown at men’s trade show Pitti Uomo in Florence, where the designer will take up one of three guest slots, marking his first time presenting a collection abroad.
“We’ve been closely following Jiyong Kim’s work for some time now. He’s one of the most radical designers on the Korean fashion scene today,” says Francesca Tacconi, special events manager at trade show organizer Pitti Immagine. She views the slow nature of his process using the sun as a necessary statement against hyperconsumption in fashion, with Kim’s chemical-free process as a way to outsource fabric development to one of the planet’s most abundant resources: the weather. “We urgently need new narratives to interpret what’s around us, and this incredible approach by [Jiyong] represents a paradigm shift.”
Kim, who grew up in the suburbs of Ulsan, a large industrial city around 300 kilometers south of Seoul, represents a new wave of Korean designers with a global mindset. Before attending Central Saint Martins, he left South Korea to study at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, and gained experience working under the late Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, as well as at Lemaire, learning the power of macro brand-building from the former and a granular attention to detail from the latter.
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