Juun. J F/W 08.09 Paris

[Guest suckdick]

[Guest suckdick]

REEBOK x JUUN J

[goldengloves]

I like this. Thank you Thomas and Mr. Dick for the pictures.

Those Reeboks aren't bad either. I may cop.

[cuddlysheep]

is all this stuff made in korea?

[keagan]

the reeboks look delicious. .

I will never cop though.

turtlenecks too

[keagan]

actually. I wonder what the cashflow requirements will be for shoes...

Speculations?

[thomas_highstreet]

ill be in seoul next month. ill let you supergays know pricing etc. then

[Guest suckdick]

the shoes will not be that expensive, maybe around $150 or so.

but i think only available in korea...

[poshpol]

how is the designer's name pronounced?

[dismalfuture]

I didn't recognize the 'Juun. J' bullshit lately (pronounced 'Junjee') but it wasn't but just a year or two ago he still designed under his commoner name of Jung Wook Jun....

[pmpacrmb]

http://totemfashion.com/NouvoSite/createurs/JUN/JUNcollections.htm

edit: sorry from fw 07/08, not fw 08/09, not relevant to this thread. but some older pictures, nevertheless...

[djrajio]

Ironically, we derided his F/W 2006 collection way back. It's good to see that designers can improve and evolve into their own style.

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=13939&highlight=lone+costume

[dismalfuture]

^ old habits are hard to break, I can't go out and say this collection stands on its own. It's a lot of nice clothes and good styling and a steady improvement, but Korean designers who want to sell clothes and be seen on the street are still happy to admit they are making Raf Simons for Asian figures nowadays and that they're over Hedi Slimane as of a year ago. It wasn't but last year that Juun J. was Lone Costume by Jung Wook Jun and that he was selling gold-bronze Cuban heel replicas for $900 in the department stores across Seoul. Still very premature, I think there's some change in the wings though, now that they're getting some outside talent in.

[keykoo]

I've actually never seen his stuff in Korea. What department stores carry it?

[dismalfuture]

The Galleria Department Store, West building 4F has a tiny Lone Costume kiosk store in-store, they mix up a lot of small labels into one kiosk based on themes in the Galleria. I think they grouped Lone Costume, CDG, Fred Perry X CDG, and some other random choice together. Incidentally A.P.C. is like a couple kiosks down and has always had its own full walk-in retail space despite their doubled pricing and sell pretty dismally because the distro company probably pushed for it, so obviously there's no rules as to where and how to buy stuff in Korea.

Most likely the Lotte main branch probably has it and there is probably a flagship store for main sales somewhere in Apkujung-dong. I can't recall where it might be though.

The reason for the old grouping of Lone Costume + CDG in that little kiosk was that Lone Costume (like any other Korean domestic label) was everywhere with their line season to season, so they probably threw together whatever matched color-wise and had distro that agreed to it. Rick Owens womenswear is treated similarly in that store along with many other unrelated labels.

This is the kiosk it was in for the longest time (note how different the aesthetic is to the past 2-3 collections from Juun J.)

http://www.simonhenwood.com/lonecostume/index.html

[jcotteri]

I really like this also. not a bad collection overall.

[keykoo]

Oh, I know the kiosk you are talking about. Its located in the corner next to the Vivienne Westwood kiosk right?

I've never seen his stuff in Lotte at either the Myeong Dong or Jamsil store which I assume are the larger stores.

[thomas_highstreet]

dismal - good points, i think thats exactly why juun is distancing his juun j [mainline] from the lone costume.

do you know whos assisting him at the moment? [outside tallent?] - its funny peoples views on fashion design.. at the end of the day it is product design, and your work needs to have a relative level of consumability. left to my own devices id be making penis suits and fanny masks for the rest of my days but i dont think i'd make much p'.

[dismalfuture]

^ I suspected he was pushing for some division between old and new, the name change really gets people off-track, as I said earlier he was definitely known commercially as 'Jung Wook Jun' just months ago.

That all said, he definitely has this huge positive momentum going and is probably the envy of everyone in Korea these days. His clothes are surrounded by this air of 'is it domestic? is it European?' in the stores, which is about all an Asian designer could dream of and more. There's no one else domestic that sells pieces in Juun J's range. The other 'name' designer who shows is Woo Young Mi, but she is definitely not on Juun J's level.

My mention of outside talent referred to someone you might know well. Further, it's my constant admission that Korean people are not blessed to be very aesthetically oriented people in general, and despite many things in Korea needing more foreign input and not receiving it, I can see fashion bucking this trend out of necessity. I don't want to get all scientific and Edwin Reischauer on Oriental peoples, but the culture of Korea engrains people from birth to follow and copy to a T, and to distrust foreign things until they're so big you can't ignore them and must accept them because white people overseas have said they're good. It's pretty hard to escape this if you have to go to school for 12-16 years over there, eventually everyone just falls into line. The other factor in this is that Koreans as a hot-blooded, motivated people are often lacking when it comes to restraint, this is of course a generalization but one look at Seoul city or anything Korean-made and you might be apt to agree. They just need to be shown the ropes a little, Korea has never had the chance to slow down and enjoy the good life just yet since they've been so busy developing. Korea is the banker guy who dresses terribly and works really hard to get rich and all of a sudden realizes at age 40 that they need to start taking better care of themselves and maybe step up the appearance.

Further way off topic, you might ask an American who they think of when it comes to an 'American fashion designer' and the answer would likely be Calvin Klein or Ralph Lauren, a Belgian and it'll be Martin Margiela, Japanese people and their answer might be Rei Kawakubo or Yohji Yamamoto, etc. If you ask a(ny) Korean the same, the answer is unanimously this guy (sadly):

[keykoo]

Who is that guy? The only other korean designer I know of is Woo Young Mi.

[thomas_highstreet]

good post dismal..

but that will come in time, japan's been shadowing the rest of asia for such a long time, but now we are starting to see some genuinely interesting movements..

theres actually quite a few interesting people.. gunhyo kim (awarded designer and working for dries van noten now), juun babe, suhsangyoung (medium), not to mention daul kim and park hye who are fast becoming models of choice on too many runways to count. even 'komakino' is getting q bit of interest from ravey/streetwear scene here in london..

we should meet up for a beer when i touch down if your about. seem a good bloke

[dismalfuture]

indeed... Daul has a special little spot in my heart, cute gal...

That odd looking fellow in the picture up there is Andre Kim, by the way. Recently I was engrossed in a book at Kyobo bookstore one day and next to me on the floor in my peripheral vision I see this white moonboot-looking jawn and white Tyvek pants saddle up beside me, and with a glance upward (nigga is like 6'2) I realized I was standing next to Andre Kim while he grabbed about 15 design-related books and acted fabulous. All kinds of girls snapping camera phone pictures of his frute swagz but no one daring to talk him, that is the circus that surrounds Andre Kim.

[fg0d]

The Juun J. x Reeboks look exactly like my reebok ex-o-fits but without the straps and shit.

[bakla]

dismal, when you say Juun J isn't on Woo young Mi's level, do you mean she's higher or lower? Because obviously she's had a lot of success in Europe, and I loved her Fall 07 collection (her sizing is a bit off sometimes but I constantly get compliments on one jacket of hers that I wear) although not too happy with her Spring stuff - way too

overwrought panelwork. I'm loving Juun J's Fall things, though, and trying to get a store near me here in NYC to consider carrying his stuff.

[dismalfuture]

They are Ex-o-fits by the way...

bakla, I probably blew the Woo Young Mi thing out of proportion, she is a designer deserving of some respect and a pioneer among locals. The menswear scene is maturing at hyperspeed and to be honest I can't even dig up any old pictures of Solid Homme/WYM from her pre-Paris days to show you what I was on about, Korea discards anything past like milk.

One thing we're seeing from both WYM and JJ is that they're both maturing as designers and the retail world in Korea is really maturing as well. Solid Homme and Lone Costume were both lines that were disposable mall fashion for Koreans, they were (and still are now that those two lines have been demoted to diffusion-type labels) having to battle it out on department store floors with upstart generic labels funded by conglomerate companies like Samsung/LG that don't need to show anything and bank on advertising. In menswear that meant taking the same formula they've had for Korean womens wear for some time now, which was simply concocting lines that sized down European looks proportionally, both in price and cut. WYM was probably more guilty of this than JJ mainly for pricing scheme and overexposure, as Solid Homme is a huge line that ends up being Korea's Takeo Kikuchi, dressing young salarymen.

With this rapid maturation in menswear though (along with the strong won that wasn't so 3-4 years ago), it looks like Korean designers are getting the freedom to be a lot more aggressive with their cuts now. A walk through Seoul 8 years ago would've had you feeling like everyone was 5'6" and barrel-chested, but nowadays there are just a lot of tall skinny boys who are genuinely interested in spending some real money on clothes, which is a relatively new development. Unfortunately the big labels are still insanely expensive over there and honestly out of reach for most, so these Korean designers have this huge opportunity and space to work with. Korea is Japan 25 years ago, with the added advantage of having some models to follow that the Japanese didn't get to have.

[bakla]

dismal, I find what you say is true, because a few years back WYM was originally carried here by Gigantic Brand before they closed and it was really nothing worth looking into. But I found her Fall collections from the past two years were really interesting. One store in NYC carries her and they sold out on many WYN items at full price within two weeks because the value and design were really noteworthy, so much so that I've encouraged that same store to pick up Juun J.

[keykoo]

One thing about Woo Young Mi clothes is that there is that the quality of the clothes, construction wise, don't seem nearly up to par as some of the fashion brands of the west. I'm basing this on 2006 F/W cause that's the only period from which I own a couple pieces from. Has the quality seemed to have gotten any better? I suppose the garments are significantly cheaper.

[bakla]

Definitely great quality for FW07, with WYM. The jackets and trenches I tried on and/or bought were impeccable, especially for the price. They're not that much cheaper - $600 - 700 for a great double-collar blazer, about $800 for a trench, but still below designer prices.

[thomas_highstreet]

finally got those images sorted courtesy of Masaki Takida of http://blog.livedoor.jp/tokiolondon/

[thomas_highstreet]