Kanghyuk

Kanghyuk was founded in 2017 in London by Kanghyuk Choi and Sanglak Shon, two Royal College of Art MA graduates who launched the brand as a deconstruction-anchored menswear-and-womenswear label with a singular materials-driven thesis: build the brand's defining product category around upcycled automotive airbags, repurposed as the body fabric of jackets, trousers, and outerwear. The technical and conceptual challenge of working with airbag nylon — a fabric not engineered for clothing applications — became the brand's central design proposition. The Kanghyuk vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: airbag-fabric outerwear (the brand's signature category, with each jacket using actual deployed-or-decommissioned airbag units that retain their original Tyvek-style branding and serial numbers), deconstructed leather and technical-fabric tailoring, deliberate exposed-hardware detailing referencing automotive engineering, and a colour palette anchored to airbag-cream, washed-charcoal, deep-navy, and the brand's recurring use of acid-yellow safety colours. The brand has presented at London Fashion Week since 2018 and won the LVMH Prize semi-finalist position in 2019. The brand is independent and held by Choi and Shon. Kanghyuk operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, MR PORTER, Dover Street Market, GR8, the Coexist Concept Store in Seoul, Boontheshop, and a small set of carefully chosen luxury specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more conceptually rigorous Korean-heritage menswear brands of the post-2015 London cohort, with the airbag-fabric proposition specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary upcycled-luxury fashion conversation.