The Fabulous (2022)
Review of The Fabulous / 더 패뷸러스
The introduction on this one is going to be short and sweet, just like this drama as a whole. I stumbled upon this one by accident, as I had no idea it existed before it appeared on my Netflix dashboard.
However, it came just at a time when I needed it. I had no idea Choi Min-ho was out of the army, and I nearly died when I pressed play and saw him there. It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen him in anything, especially since I fell out of K-pop three years ago, so I was like oh right, he exists and he used to act.
Anyways, as someone who went to fashion school and was briefly in the industry, I could really appreciate a show like this, even if it was not the career I could stay in myself.
Onwards with the review!
A group of four friends navigates breakups, love, and the fashion industry.
We’re introduced to the four main protagonists pretty quickly in this show. We do have one main couple: Ji Woo-min and Pyo Ji-eun. Woo-min works as a freelance photograph retoucher in the fashion industry, and the viewer does get to see some digs at that because he’s often just dubbed as the photographer’s assistant.
Pyo Ji-eun works at a PR agency that caters to luxury brands, which means she keeps crossing paths with Woo-min while at work.
In the first episode, we see a steamy sex scene between these two (and man, it was intense for a Korean drama), but then it’s quickly discussed how these two used to date and broke up. Clearly they’re doing a good job of smothering the feelings for each other.
There’s only eight episodes in this drama, so we’re in for a wild ride. The other two friends in their group are Joseph, who’s a fashion designer who has slightly eccentric designs, and Seon-ho, a famous supermodel.
We learn that Seon-ho isn’t well-liked by her fellow models and her boyfriend, a designer, is cheating on her. Ji-eun smashes his windows in with a rock while drunk, setting her up for mild failure as the woman he was cheating with his someone Ji-eun literally has to work with at the agency the next day.
At the same time, a waiter discovers Ji-eun left her wallet, and the kid, who’s in college, uses her for connections to try and get into this world of fashion and glamour. If you’re a Produce 101 fan, you’re going to recognize the actor who plays that college kid.
So the entirety of the series dances around a similar set of topics. The biggest if Woo-min and Ji-eun’s relationship, because they clearly have feelings for each other yet hang out like they’re friends.
Woo-min tells Seon-ho he doesn’t want Ji-eun dating anyone but he wants to keep his options open, while Ji-eun does get a boyfriend towards the end of the series and dumps him for Woo-min.
These two keep doing a dance every episode before finally getting together at the end of the show, which thankfully is only eight episodes because I think this would’ve gotten very repetitive if it continued for longer than that.
The other plot lines revolve around Seon-ho’s struggles getting work, especially because of her reputation and fashion brands increasingly using Instagram influencers to market their product instead.
Ji-eun always has some kind of work crisis every other episode as they try to get new clients, so she often ends up answering the phone while out with people and getting stressed.
Joseph is trying to make his fashion brand happen, gets offered a job in Paris, but doesn’t want to leave his friends behind and his assistant constantly serves as his voice of reason. The college kid is trying to find love and a career on his own, and keeps running into Woo-min and the group while finding a girl at a diner (who’s so pretty, I loved her).
Those who like fashion will really like this series. I found it to be realistic about some elements, although every single one of these characters clearly comes from money. I don’t know about Korea, but in the US fashion pays absolutely horrible money for the sheer amount of work you put in.
Considering Woo-min drives the nicest car I’ve seen for someone his age, and Ji-eun and he have super good looking apartments, I’m guessing every single one of them comes from wealth, especially Joseph. Ain’t no one got that big of a studio space when they’re starting out as a designer.
Besides that, I found this to be sweet in how it portrays the group’s friendship. It was believable and they were sweet to each other, plus, for the first time, characters wore Airpods. I’ve never seen that in a drama, which made it more real to me for some reason? The romance, too, wasn’t bad even though the outcome and predictability of it could be a lot better.
Overall Thoughts
I’m scraping the surface of what actually happens in this drama, but I think it was cute. It was a nice distraction for eight episodes, and I genuinely liked these characters and cared for what happened to them.
I can’t say the same for other dramas—I was watching the Lee Jae-wook and Go Ara drama right before this and had to stop because it was so boring and I could not care for the life of me what happened to those two’s characters.
This show, however, had its moments. It was stylish (literally from the clothes, too), well done in a short time frame, and didn’t make me want to skip around. Kudos to that. I recommend this show to watch at least once. I don’t think I’ll go back and revisit it for a long time, but I liked it enough to give it a good review!
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