Wooyoungmi

Wooyoungmi was founded in 2002 in Seoul by Korean designer Woo Young Mi as a contemporary luxury menswear brand specifically focused on what Woo described as 'a deliberately-architectural Korean-tailoring vocabulary anchored to contemporary Parisian-fashion-week-luxury menswear proportions.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2002 Korean-anchored contemporary-luxury-menswear brands, with the deliberately-Paris-fashion-week-positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the broader European-luxury-menswear conversation. The Wooyoungmi vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-architectural single-breasted blazers in Italian-mill wool with deliberately-exaggerated-shoulder construction, oversized boxy cotton-and-linen shirts with deliberate-asymmetric proportional construction, deconstructed leather-and-technical-fabric outerwear, hand-knitted Korean-cashmere sweaters, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, washed-navy, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, royal-blue, and traditional-Korean-aesthetic colour combinations. The brand has presented at Paris Men's Fashion Week each season since 2011, becoming one of the first Korean menswear designers to consistently show on the Paris calendar. The brand is independent and held by Woo and her family. Wooyoungmi operates flagship retail in Seoul (Cheongdam-dong — the brand's home flagship), Paris (Le Marais, the long-running Wooyoungmi Paris store), London (Mayfair), New York (Soho), Tokyo (Aoyama), Hong Kong, plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, and a curated set of luxury menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the most consistently disciplined post-2002 Korean-anchored contemporary-luxury-menswear brands, with the deliberately-Paris-fashion-week visual-positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the broader European-luxury-menswear conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2011.