RE RHEE by Concept Korea | Paris Women’s Fashion Week AW25
Words by Jude Jones, Photographs by Julian Gomez Succo
Few countries do it like South Korea does. Providence of arguably both the biggest boy and girl bands in the world right now ( BTS and Black Pink, respectively), of the current Nobel Prize Winner in cerebral novelist Han Kang, and of some of the most emulated street style in the world, its recent ascendance to the apex of cultural capital is a developmental metamorphosis that rivals its economic explosion of the late twentieth century, colloquially called as “the Miracle of the Han River.”
However, despite the now-global reach and desire-lines sewn by South Korea’s cultural exports, its in-ways with the notoriously fortress-like world of luxury fashion have been so far few. This is the barrier that Concept Korea, the Korean Creative Content Agency’s (KOCCA) initiative to support the globalisation of K-fashion, is attempting to tear down, presenting three designer brands in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo as part of Paris Fashion Week AW25 in hybridised display. (See MMAM, EENK)
RE RHEE
RE RHEE is the brand of Lee Jun-bok and Joo Hyun-jung, focussing on a modern minimalism of clean lines, ergonomic shapes, and classic palettes. Opening their AW25 show, “Forms of Resonance”, with the ethereally warbling tones of Paris-based jazz vocalist Youn Sun Nah, RE RHEE this season juxtaposed its self-styled visual quietness with loud and ambitious textures: boxy blazers made from mohair, sleek faux-fur dresses, and boa-feather jackets.
Paired with new plays of visual asymmetry (diagonal dress cuts, skirts that plummet then rise as they wrap the waist) and playful styling moments (one model’s face was half-covered by a grey fur bucket hat, another sunglasses and a thick black bag à la Balenciaga), RE RHEE transubstantiated a normally coy minimalism into a sort of quiet and clean maximalism this season, a new language of sophistication.
