Review of Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives on Primary Sources by Kyunghee Pyun and Minjee Kim

*Dress History of Korea*, edited by Kyunghee Pryun and Minjee Kim (2023). Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology, and always wanted to minor in Fashion History and take a class with Kyunghee Pyun, but I never had the opportunity. COVID hit and I decided to graduate early, forcing me to nix a lot of the plans I made during my undergraduate years.

But when I first found out this book existed in the wild, I knew I had to get my hands on it. I was doing my master’s thesis on colonial and postcolonial Korean women’s literature at the time, so I kind of knew that I was going to be doing a lot of reading on Korea.

This wasn’t relevant to my thesis per say, but because I learned how to use Interlibrary Loan, I was able to pick up this book for a month.

My biggest gripe about academia tends to be about how expensive the books are in the long run—the average person doesn’t have access to a university library, and I would have never been able to read this book at the time because it was going for about $140 for a hardcover copy.

When I’m writing this, a paperback will be available soon for cheaper, and I will be purchasing a copy. My ILL came in about two weeks after I placed the request, and it ended up being one of my readings as I tried to take my mind off of the other five million things I needed to do.

Here’s my review!

An overview of Korean dress history and museum practices, through a series of scholarly essays.

So this is very much an academic book, so if you’re not used to this kind of writing, you might need to go in with certain expectations. There’s a compelling introduction written by the editors of the book, where I noticed a few unfortunate typos throughout, and then we launch straight into the essays.

The first portion of this monograph is about Korean cultural history through the lens of fashion. It runs in chronological order, so we go all the way back to the more ancient histories of Korea, specifically when it was Goryeo and Silla.

For those periods, the essays dwell more on material culture such as accessories, as an unfortunate reality to fashion history is that it’s really hard to preserve clothes.

Older clothes were only made of natural fabrics, which means they can easily decompose if in the right conditions for that. If you ever head into museum collections, you’ll see the strict conditions the historical garments have to live under. It’s similar to artwork.

Dyes and whatnot also fade over time, so a piece from Antoinette’s France might not be as vibrant as it once was when the wearer was strutting it. In the case of Korean history, accessories are an important lens into how people lived and interacted with each other.

We then move through the other periods of time throughout the course of this book’s first section. Being the colonial period nerd that I am, I was most fascinated with this section, especially with the lens of Japan’s forced modernization of Korean culture and society. New Woman fashion is so incredibly interesting to me.

After that, we head into the museum practices and theories section of the book. I found this interested me less so, so I yawned a little here and there, but I see why it is important in the grand scheme of things.

For example, you need to understand how attitudes towards curation and museums shift when it comes to fashion history, as clothing was seen as something more frivolous. People tend to look down on fashion history as a field, but we’re slowly starting to see that change as scholars acknowledge it as an art and reflection of history.

Overall Thoughts

I loved this book enough to plan to purchase a copy when the paperback comes out. It’ll be released (it’s not yet out when I am typing this up from my room) before I come home from India, as I received a Fulbright and will be moving abroad, so I will end up buying a copy when I get back to the states.

But yeah, I think this is such a valuable piece of literature for anyone who wants to learn more about historical Korean fashion. A lot of people I know are interested in Korea, but never really dig deeper beyond the contemporary popular culture.

Although this is written for academic audiences, I firmly believe the first half of the book is accessible for everyone. Just get used to academic style writing and you’re good to go.

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