Pays · Asia
South Korea
Seoul has built a tailoring scene since about 2010, mostly young makers trained in Italy cutting soft, slim jackets that customers find through social media.
Seoul has developed a bespoke tailoring trade within about fifteen years, largely through young makers who trained in Italy and returned. The work tends towards a soft, Neapolitan-influenced cut adapted to a slimmer local build, and the scene is unusually connected to social media, which is how most of its customers found it.
A trade built in a decade
There was tailoring in Korea before (a substantial made-to-measure trade served office workers for decades), but bespoke in the European sense is recent. Its founders are mostly men who went to Naples or Florence in their twenties, worked in workshops there, and came back to open their own.
The result is a scene with an unusually consistent aesthetic: soft shoulders, light construction, close through the body, cut for a build that is generally slimmer and less broad-chested than the Italian customer the method was developed for. Adapting a Neapolitan pattern to that build is the technical problem the Seoul trade has spent its short existence solving.
Visibility as a business model
Korean tailors were among the first anywhere to build a clientele primarily through photographs online. That has consequences worth naming: it favours houses whose work photographs well, it accelerated the spread of particular details, and it means a Seoul workshop can have an international waiting list before it has a reputation in its own city.
It also makes the scene unusually legible from outside. Where the practice of a Neapolitan workshop may be documented nowhere, a Seoul house's construction is often visible in detail.
En un coup d'œil
Tailleurs sur mesure dans South Korea
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Styles de coupe
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Villes
Crédits photographiques 4
- Front view of Heungnyemun Gate in Gyeongbokgung Palace Seoul South Korea: Photograph · Basile Morin · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
- An illustration of the house's recorded cut: soft shoulder, light canvas chest, soft, close and short. Not a photograph of the house's own work.: Original art · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale original art
- A soft-shouldered jacket on a modern stand: Original art · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale · Il Sartoriale original art
- Cloth Shop "Olivethey" in Gangnam Seoul - DSC00435: Photograph · Daderot · Wikimedia Commons · CC0