Is Kpop still on brand?
The Met Gala, in past years, has been known for wild fashion, especially from female pop stars. Think Lady Gaga arriving in a vivid Marilyn Monroe pink dress with a 25-foot train held aloft by five dancers in 2019 or Rihanna’s dreamy floral cloud dress in 2017. I’m not a huge fashion person but I enjoy looking at interesting clothes on attractive people and the Met Gala, in past years, has provided that.
But there was a tweet going around from freelance critic Carolyn Hinds about the 2021 Met Gala that has been rattling around in my brain for a few days now:
“K-pop is known for lavish and outlandish outfits, so putting her in something so basic for the Met Gala of all places feels a bit insulting.”
What Carolyn is referring to here is the dress worn by Rosé, who, with CL, was one of the two Kpop stars to attend the Met Gala this year. Now I thought Rosé looked absolutely darling in her black cocktail dress but Carolyn wasn’t wrong that it was far more… normal a look than we’ve come to expect at the Met Gala and if she hadn’t been the Rosé I doubt anybody would have paid attention to a dress calculated to avoid both the “best dressed” and “worst dressed” post-Gala mediaplay.
CL, on the other hand, swanned around in a bold, you’d-never-wear-this-in-real-life, massive denim wrap dress thingy (that’s the technical term I’m going with) that felt much more on brand with the Met Gala.
But which of the two was on brand for Kpop in 2021?
That’s the part of Carolyn’s comment that has been rattling around in my head. Is Kpop really known for lavish and outlandish outfits in 2021 or is that image a holdover from the days when CL was the It Girl and G-Dragon was setting fashion trends every time he stepped outside?
Where are the lavish and outlandish outfits today? There’s Winner’s Mino, of course, and his smash hit “Fiance” with its punk rock-Korean royalty theme MV was quite influential. Taemin’s last few MVs before he enlisted were all incredible and visually quite “lavish and outlandish”. SHINee’s “Don’t Call Me” had some lavish and outlandish looks (Hello, Minho’s nipple) but these guys are all from the same generation as CL…
But lavish and outlandish is no longer part of the Kpop visual vocabulary for today’s groups. What’s on brand right now is relatable. And, worse, in some cases: just plain cheap. Ill fitting, untailored, and off the rack has become standard for some of the biggest names in Kpop. On stage you rarely even see matching idol-style uniforms any more let alone like that time SHINee wore those giant hats or TOP’s famous Mondrian-inspired suit. What passes for “lavish and outlandish” in recent years is just kind of sad. Mino and Taemin and Key et. al. being the exception (and no I will not shut up about “Idea” aka the greatest song of all time ever).
Is it just that no trendsetters have risen to fill in the gap left by BigBang? We still see the echoes of their impact trickling down to today’s groups when they do try for something bold.
Is it that Kpop has leaned too far into the wholesome, mild, cup-of-milk, organic, authentic image popularized by its biggest boy group? Would today’s Kpop audiences accept “lavish and outlandish” even if anybody was selling it or would they be torn apart on social media and destroyed for not being authentic enough? Lavish and outlandish requires artifice and artifice is out.
Or has the Kpop canvas shrunk too small, the new claustrophobic phone screen size simply unable to accommodate lavish and outlandish anymore. Kpop exists on our phones now, not in real life. It exists in social media sh00ters for oppa and desperately trying to avoid the sh00ters for oppa and in streaming numbers and view counts and harassing fans over online voting. Companies aren’t going to spend money on lavish and outlandish when it’s the view counts that get good press, not the content of the MV…
I don’t have any answers today (maybe you do?) but I thought it was an interesting dichotomy seeing the “old” and “new” Kpop side-by-side at the Met Gala like that.