earticle

영어

Street fashion is an embodied and mediated social practice that, like dance, the primary medium of the exchange of information is the body. At Seoul Fashion Week, street fashion has become a performance of sartorial acts of gender transgression. And when interpreted through Elaine Aston’s notion of feminist theater practice that utilizlizs the Brechtian dramatic tool of Verfremdung (“alienation”) to help the audience form a critical view of a social practice. According to Aston, there are three main forms of embodied, performed “display” in which feminist theater engages as a way of social critique: Over-Display, Under-Display, and Cross-gendered Display. This paper posits an additional one, called Code-Smashing Display, that is part and parcel of a unique form of Astonian, feminist theater practice that occurs within Korean street fashion as it is constructed as cultural text. Code-Smashing Display is the very currency of the socially conscious Verfremdung in which many frequently paepi engage and which seems to help define style within Korean street fashion as a transgressive social practice unto itself.