Wooyoungmi Spring Summer 2023 at Paris Men's Fashion Week

Auctions represent a process of renewal : a re-evaluation and revaluation of the past through the eyes of the present. This year marks two decades since Woo Young Mi created her eponymous brand and staged its inaugural show in Paris.

And while the Wooyoungmi Spring-Summer 2023 collection is not an anniversary exercise per se, the breath of history imbues its character through a contemporary lens. Infused with the implied atmosphere of an auction, the grand gallery of Les Arts Décoratifs frames a new expression for Wooyoungmi founded in the memories of its earliest incarnations.

When the brand relocated to its newly-built headquarters in Seoul this spring, Woo was reintroduced to her archives from the early 2000s. She detected in them a likeness between the look of the time and the way young generations dress today.

Fuelled by the nostalgia of social media, their so-called Y2K look is a salute to the era in which they were born: the millennium and its encircling years, with its rugged minimalism, mashup of Britpop and hip-hop dressing, and nascent appetite for noughties bling.

On the Wooyoungmi runway, the idea unfolds with a delicate approach cultivated through an aesthetic twenty years in the making. The silhouette amplifies expressions observed in the brand’s early work: a boyish contrast between volumes, very skin-tight as if outgrown or very generous as if made to grow into, which inevitably evokes the dress codes of the late-1990s skateboarding community interpreted in workwear as well as tailoring.

Collection Notes Wooyoungmi

It’s a wardrobe shared between men and women: scaled up and down for fit and feel in a free exchange between masculine and feminine codes.

Tailored suits and outerwear created in cotton-mixed hemp and cotton-poly blends appear in the authentic colours of the heritage men’s wardrobe: black, navy, brown and beige.

It is contrasted by sheer underpinnings in artificial pastels also echoed in knitwear: royal blue, frog green, chocolate brown, shocking pink and digital lavender. Workwear is crafted in cotton-poly blends and denim, while leather features throughout the wardrobe.

Sportswear is treated as tailoring – and vice versa – in a dialogue that mimics the timeless language of a teenage approach to dressing: a wardrobe collaged from parental pass-me-downs, vintage store finds, and piggy bank blowouts.

Jewellery invokes the styling of the music video’s millennial heyday: crystal necklaces, bracelets and belly chains, chunky rings and ear cuffs, and rigid metal neck rings which nod at the idea of chokers.

Hammer pendants appear as a symbol of the collection’s poetic auction motifs. Belts are crafted in leather or crystal. Shoes draw on the grammar of teenage activities and skatepark culture: platform loafers and stompy boots, formal platform slides, and sneakers hybridised with the properties of bowling shoes.

Shoppers, briefcases, handbags, mini handbags and clutches evoke an adolescent approach to repurposing the bags of our grandparents.