…this “silk robe” (&I use quotations here as this one is made out of a polyester crepe, I believe but dunno) is, by far, currently my single most-favorite item of non-winter clothing (my overwhelming joy for winter outerwear will not be outdone by a robe); I absolutely feel awesome whenever wearing it, and I wear it a lot but not too much cause I don’t wanna wear it out. It makes me feel important as it swishes behind me, and the best compliment I’ve ever received in my entire life was in Seoul when a teacher/acquaintance of my lifemate said, outloud, while we, a small group of people partying in the name of a foreigner’s farewell, were walking from one 노래방 to another, “You look like a queen the way your…cape?…moves so elegantly.” I thanked her profusely. Koreans are not shy about speaking their mind when it comes to your appearance (for instance, another teacher at my lifemate’s school once greeted me at the door by saying, “Oh, Tiffany, you look so tired, today,” to which I replied, “This is what everyone looks like, when they don’t makeup,” and I never wear makeup), so when you receive an actual compliment, you can take it to the bank.
And they do this with your best interest at heart, I promise. As jarring as it is, I do honestly think that Koreans believe that they are doing you a favor by telling you when you look bad, if a haircut does not suit you, if you’ve gotten a bit fatter, etc., etc., &c. Koreans are people, too, so yea, of course they’re capable of pettiness and what have you, so I’ve seen my fair share of backhanded compliments &or the giving of compliments that are obviously mean. But really, the way that Koreans truly diss you (in my opinion, and yes, the entirety of this writing is all opinion, conjecture, the ramblings of an outside observer with only an inkling of an inside track) is simply by not seeing you. They’ll truly just ignore you. It’s a skill I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to master, especially now after being on the receiving end of sheer void while staring into the face of another human being.
I hadn’t put the robe in such grandiose terms in my own mind, but it felt good to hear that that’s how they perceived it. And so, I remember the day I purchased the thing quite vividly in my mind. Ever since moving to Korea, the lifemate and I had been trying to figure out how and what sort of style we wanted to have. Having rid ourselves of all our stuff except the bare essentials, we were essentially freed to reimagine our look (the lifemate for the first time, me for the umpteenth). I’ve always been shooting toward something so fuckingly brilliantly described by Shalewa Sharpe [@silkyjumbo] as “Rumspringa Realness,” and I feel like I was able to start aiming toward that “look” in Seoul. Essentially, everything I wore needed to be oversized, and in Korea, that’s a tough ask as a very average-sized United Statesian.
In Seoul, I learned that not only was I the largest available size for “regular” women, I was basically the same size as a men’s medium. Hmmm. So, this whole prospect of going over-sized was slow going at first since the purple jeggings that I’m wearing (the entirety of this outfit, socks, underwear and all is from our days in Seoul) are literally a Korean LARGE. I’m five feet and nearly five inches tall and weigh 127 lbs (a little over fifty-seven-and-a-half kilograms, largely “fat” by Korean standards). Nevertheless, oversized is a look in Asia, and Asians love it.
So, basically, I started by looking at what the Korean mommies wore. Korean mommies who can afford (either with high income or strained credit, not so unlike the U.S.) to send their children to private English kindergarten are doing pretty well, so when it comes to style, they’re looking pretty good. The thing I noticed is that Koreans enjoy dark colors, don outerwear that works in favor of super-city mass-transit commuting, care less about shoes than one would imagine (again due mostly, in my theory, to the pedestrian-centric nature of Seoul living, and the fact that one must remove their shoes when entering homes, some restaurants, and other sorts of places where shoes are simply not allowed), and typically wear clothing that suits the floor-seating lifestyle of Asia, not to mention that to live and move within and throughout a super-city requires impeccable, professional-level purse/man-purse usage/organizational skills. Holding up a subway entrance/exit gate or slowing down any sort of anything is…I don’t even know how to say it…because it’s beyond rude…it’s ugh, shameful.
For business professionals, I’d say that a pencil skirt suit, flouncy blouse, black pumps, and impeccable skin/hair/nails are a must. At the English academies with which I was familiar, clothing was more casual, but still always with clean hair, nails and face (I refuse to comment on the foreign teachers’ typically blatant disregard for professional wear). And as far as street wear was concerned (&I use was because I left almost exactly two years ago, and like anyone who has ever been to Seoul, I cannot pretend to know anything about what life is like there, today), Koreans dress more to signal their age first and then, their financial status. In Korea, you fit in by fitting in. Even your haircut signals your age-range. My face had me mostly fall into the mommy category (but would often get strange looks because I wore my hair too long to be a mommy) with questions about whether or not I had a boy or a girl, where my kids were, how old my kids were despite the fact that I was never actually seen with this imagined child because someone who looked roughly my age with a “husband” needed to have kids, somewhere, despite whether or not my kimchi lady ever saw them, and I’d awkwardly have to say that “No, I don’t have any kids. I don’t want any,” to which they’d return a sad face as they think that I’m incapable of having children. But in the case of my kimchi lady, I couldn’t make her believe me, but she always gave me a lot of free food and a sad sympathetic smile whenever I stopped by, so, at least I got a little something out of being childless.
There’s little to no room to stand out, but that is slowly changing, and because the idea of standing out is slowly being accepted, it will become “normal” to “stand out,” thereby creating an entirely new culture birthed from the acceptance of something new that now must be adopted by society as a whole. Read this however positively or negatively as you’d like. Seoul doesn’t care.
Ultimately, I shopped every time I left my house. I was constantly on the prowl for the perfect pieces to define my style. In the meantime, I started slowly building up my collection of solid-color staples. Currently, the following items round out what I’d label as “Solid-Color Staples,” and each of the items can be worn with multiple other staples as well as with multiple different statement or style items: Just kidding. I just walked into our closet to see what’s going on, and that’s a hard NO right now. I will do a full itemized list of my “capsule collection” at some point, but that point has yet to come.
And then, the most perfect day arrived. While aboard one of the numerous subway lines, along the best subway transit system in the world, I saw them. I saw the perfect Korean. I saw the person who was already embodying the style I wished for myself every time I shopped. I saw them, and in that moment, I knew that it was possible. I just had to keep an open mind. I will not describe this perfect person because I do not want to influence the decisions of any future sartorially-minded intellectuals. They embodied everything I was hoping to achieve, and I loved that they were a bit older than me. I could tell they were not my age, and so I resigned myself to the reality that achieving my ultimate style will take time, and in that time, it might change more than once. But no matter, I was renewed with hope to really create the style I wanted for myself.
And then, the most perfect item crossed paths with me on a routine run (literally) to our local Homeplus. If you haven’t been to Korea recently, Homeplus and Lotte Mart and EMart and the likes of all of these types of indoor, vertical strip malls, these types of “malls” typically include a grocery store in the basement, clothing and knick-knack shops, a restaurant sometimes, dry cleaning, car detailing, any sort of basic services throughout the main floors and vertically for a few floors, and then at the very top of the parking garage that tops the few floors of stores sits a movie theater, most often times accompanied by a coffee shop (or two), concessions, and sometimes, more restaurants. These are not to be confused with department stores, which are very similar but are larger and have a more department-store-on-steroids feel (our favorites being 신세계 의정부 and 용산 아이파크 [post-construction]), whereas these other indoor strip malls (I clearly do not know if they have an official name) are more akin to a Wal-Mart Supercenter on steroids, both will have movie theaters on the top floors…typically. Anyhow…
It was just a normal day. We had run (like I said, literally, about three miles, one way, a typical run+grocery scenario played out about two-to-three times a week, spread across two different strip malls [롯데마트 and the 홈플러스 중계점] and our neighborhood department store 롯데백화점노원점) to Homeplus, and as we were rounding to the left through the double sliding doors, I saw this robe hanging from one of the clothes stalls I routinely peruse when we have time to peruse. It was hanging at the end of the clothes rack; I made a beeline toward it, saw the sticker price was about 50,000₩ (a little less than $50, at the time), then saw that it was on sale for 32,000₩. Score. I asked the lifemate for some money (not because I don’t have my own money but because I had no money on me at the time because I had not planned on shopping for clothes), and he coughed it up. That was back in early 2015. I’ve basically designed my entire wardrobe around this…robe.
For travel, I used to wear this item because it served well as a little cover-up if the airplane was too cold and because it folded up into a tiny ball and took up little space. It dries quickly, and I also own a more springtime robe for spring. More recently, I’ve updated my travel outfit to be even more globally appropriate, but I suppose we won’t be seeing that for a while. It is an outfit I do wear, often through the transitioning of seasons, so perhaps we will actually see it quite soon! Who knows. For now, today is about this robe. I enjoy wearing it; you can’t ruin my mood if I’m in it, and it can be worn with pretty much every combination of my solid-colored staples. The only time it becomes completely awkward to wear is when the temperature requires an outer layer. Despite being a great transition item, it doesn’t actually keep me warm once we near the low teens, and the robe is an absolute fashion nightmare to wear under a coat…especially if that coat is shorter than the thing. I’ve only been caught once in that type of situation, and it will never happen again. Boo.
Until next time ✌💗🌱
Lady Polarity 