THE CONCRETE SCHOLAR: INFRASTRUCTURE, STYLE, AND THE UNLIKELY TRIUMPH OF KOREAN STREET FASHION CULTURE

The Importance of Korean Street Fashion
Much to everyone’s surprise, Korean “street” style has made Seoul one of the most influential style hubs in the world (check VOGUE, TeenVOGUE, HighSnobiety, or ANY major fashion media outlet in the last 5 years around March or October). Yet, understanding the rise of Korean street fashion culture requires an understanding of the history of Korean industrialization/modernization, the ‘private-branded hive”(PBH) structures housed at the site of historic Dongdaemun, the recent history of Dongdaemun as a product of government cluster development policy, and the specifics of how textile industry economics work — all before even getting down to the nitty gritty of recording the culture that all this infrastructure produced.

The Power of This Course
This course will surely be one of the densest and most intense, hard-core courses you'll ever take. You will be expected to not only execute quickly acquired technical skills, but she will be expected to melt those with high level analysis of social data as pictures. This course specializes in training you through praxis, which is to say that you will not just be working in the realm of theory, nor simply as a technician, but in the zone where those two skill sets meet. But even more simply, he won't be allowed to just be a photographer, nor will you just be a social scientist removed from the field, sitting back and looking at the data before you on a desk. This is a course that will require you to excel at both roles, executing well with both your brain and your fingers. You will also learn by failing, and by failing a lot. The best way to gain new skills is where they integrate hypothetically with various types of skills, and doing that while being forced to produce good work on a deadline, and nothing is more stressful (and educational) then being expected to do good fashion photography while the subject is waiting, tapping her foot, expecting excellent results. You will study, prepare, and fail, fail, fail. And that's the way you learn an immense amount in this course, more than you've done in any other course of learning in your life.

In-Person Timings
Week 1 — First Week of March (6 hours of training/prep, likely broken across two sessions)
Week 2 — Second Week of March (~6 hours of training/fieldwork, likely in two sessions)
Week 3 — Seoul Fashion Week (operating every day from March 18-23, from around 10am-8pm, which will have to be scheduled and permissions arranged for students in school)
Week 4 — Fourth Week of March (single academic session of 3-4 hours, prepping for collation/writing up of observations/conclusions)
Thereafter, TBD — Subsequent support session of around 3 hours to help guide final writing/publishing

A compelling street fashion portrait succeeds on both aesthetical and ethnographic grounds. It is not only visually compelling, but it also contains some social data. It is also marks the convergence of the many skills as the ethnographer. This young tailor/designer whom we grabbed from the pizza shop line and interviewed on the spot offers her style statement as a bit of social data — a cultural signal of the state of gender identity, women’s social position, what’s trendy, and even what kind of change this neighborhood (Haebangchon) has experienced recently. Ten years before 2017, this kind of young, hip, urban professional would likely not have been in Yongsan-dong 2-ga, nor would she have likely dressed up quite this much to walk around there. By even being able to take this picture, we learn a lot not just about the subject and her fashion, but what kind of person goes to this neighborhood these days. The popular pizza shop/sports bar is typical of the commercial gentrification going on in Haebangchon. The Kobawoo Supermarket over the subjects right shoulder went out of business two days after this picture was taken. Combined with knowing the terrain and doing an interview with the subject, it’s amazing how much information can be gained from a single photographic interaction.

WEEK ONE: Honing the Tools and Theory Prep

Any entry-level DSLR or mirrorless camera will do. Really, any camera with manual features and a hotshoe will do. (If students don’t have one, the class will have a DSLR available for use during class time, but learning on one’s own camera is obviously best.

Before you can record and research, you need to be trained to utilize legitimate skills you didn’t previously possess. One of the powers of specialized skills is utilizing it to gain and re-present insights others don’t have. Street fashion portraiture is a fusion of technical photo skills (which you will learn this week—yes, you will learn all the basics of photography on a DSLR this week, interviewing techniques, and looking into the background of the subject (both literally and figuratively below). in this session, you will learn to fully control the camera in terms of the Golden Exposure Triangle (shutter, aperture, and ISO), as well as basics of how to operate the camera, from lenses and flashes, and triggers to picture formats and card management. In this first week your brain will be positively bursting with new information, which will be begging to be applied during the second week. You will also be given three academic articles on the Korean fashion industry and specifically the history of Dongdaemun to peruse and keep in your brain buffer as we prepare for fashion week.

WEEK TWO: Fire Baptism (Doing Street Fashion Photography)

Before you can record and research, you need to be trained to utilize legitimate skills you didn’t previously possess. One of the powers of specialized skills is utilizing it to gain and re-present insights others don’t have. Street fashion portraiture is a fusion of technical photo skills (which you will learn this week—yes, you will learn all the basics of photography on a DSLR this week, interviewing techniques, and looking into the background of the subject (both literally and figuratively below). This week, you will apply those basic skills from the first session on the streets of Seoul and take actual pictures of people you don't know and become a street fashion photographer.

Dr. Hurt’s photography students in Hongdae, 2016.

By this second week, students will have read through the major background readings and will be forced to apply the technical skills learned in Week 1 to the actual acquisition of street subjects to photograph and interview. Dr. Hurt will make sure all students get familiar with the process and are actually out doing street fashion photography and gathering ethnographic data as interviews and environmental portrait photographers thinking in terms of cultural geography. Students this week will be forced to fail often in the process of applying their fledgling skills, which is actually the best way to learn them. But to alleviate the stress a bit, our first session of ethnographic portraiture will be in Hongdae, near subway exit 11, likely on a Sunday. Subjects in Hongdae tend to be friendly and more patient, which will make the students’ work a bit easier to carry out as they work to integrate both technical and social skills in the service of ethnographic data gathering.

WEEK THREE: REAL FIELDWORK (SFW — Fashion Content Production under Fire)

A shot taken by Dr. Hurt that will be utilized for the cover of his upcoming book on Korean fashion, taken at Seoul Fashion Week in March 2019.

Utilizing the training you've had until now, from weeks one and two, this is when you dive right into fashion production work at Seoul Fashion Weeek at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, the heart of the fast fashion and textile industry in Korea. The difficulty level will still not be high here, but we will also be walking over the Jongno area, where it will be significantly harder to find agreeable and cooperative subjects, so students will be forced to leverage their resources more while working under slightly higher pressure to quickly utilize their technical skills with the camera, as less patient subjects leave less room for mistakes. We will take more time to start up with coffee and post-production discussion since students will have more to say and figure out.

WEEK FOUR: Debriefing and Data Collation

A 2018 paper for the journal Marxism 21 written by Dr. Hurt.

This will be the big challenge, where all your analytical and technical skills will come together. This is when you will start making sense of your photographs as data, as ethnographic interaction, and as method, and will be the beginning point of writing and theoretical application for the month you just experienced.

The kind of fashion culture work our team will produce at Seoul Fashion Week.