2020SS <Flower; between the monstrous and the lovely>

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In the previous collections, Jungwoo Park explored and celebrated the fleeting stages of boyhood and the adolescent life that follow. For his 2020SS collection, Park carries his investigations further along in time, and arrives at the advent of manhood. When Park was beginning to formulate the narrative of the advent of male adulthood, an unexpected image came to his mind: the imagery of flowers.



Are flowers beautiful?

The collection developed out of Jungwoo Park’s ontological questions about the allegory of flowers and their beauty--a question which resonate with his long-held questions about fashion. What happens to our belief in the allegorical beauty of flowers when we find beautiful flowers made up of monstrous petals, or beautiful petals arranged into the most monstrous flowers? Applied to fashion, the question becomes that of the relationship between individual garments and looks they create. The 2020SS collection has commenced from this paradoxical part-to-whole dynamic of the monstrous and the beautiful.



Beautiful: desirable, tasteful

Monstrous: off-putting, strange, bizarre,



Who is he and what flower is he holding?

The abstract problems of allegory regarding flowers and their beauty were then given a (literal) incarnate rendition when Jungwoo Park reworked the question into a story: a story of a man who brings a flower to his date. Jungwoo Park asked his acquaintances the following question, and from their answers extracted a set of imageries around which his collection took form.



“Imagine a man ____ing a flower in his hand. His hair _____ed, the man holds a _____ in his other hand, and its _____ scent fills the space. His teeth are gently pressing down into his lower lip. What is the flower do you see in his hand?”



In trying to describe the flower, Jungwoo Park’s interviewees came up with different backstories of the man holding it. While some imagined him as a romantic lover, others saw him in something more sinister or off-putting. This set of discordant imaginations served both as the raw materials and the design rationale for Jungwoo Park’s design process. Weaving together the seemingly contradictory images that are at once romantic and provocative, and flamboyant yet subdued, Jungwoo Park sought in his 2020SS collection to concretize the uneasy unity of the monstrous and loveliness.