Worlding Hanbok
Reimagining Korean Clothing
Worlding Hanbok
Reimagining Korean Clothing
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Description
What did Koreans wear before t-shirts and jeans and what futures might still be woven into those garments?
Once an everyday attire shaped by climate and agrarian life, hanbok has been pushed to the margins of museums and fashion shows. Yet in grassroots movements and experimental practices, it is being revived as a site of quiet resistance.
At the heart of Worlding Hanbok is Lee Ki-Yeon, an activist, who during South Korea's 1980s dictatorship initiated a movement of wearing earth-toned, oversized farmers' hanboks as a symbol of solidarity and renewal. These hanboks were not only structurally ecological – they were crafted to enable generous sharing of garments, embodying values of energetic circulation, material activity, and collaborative inhabitation.
Through embodied ethnography and fieldwork across hanbok workshops, a weaving facility, online hanbok communities, and a textile lab in Potsdam, anthropologist Yoonha Kim shows how the making and wearing of hanbok enacts alternative ways of knowing, being, and relating.
Table of Contents
Part I. Framing the Practice
1. Introduction - Worlding Hanbok
2. Enclothed Exploration: Wearing as a Method
Interlude: Meeting Lee Ki-Yeon
Part II. Politics and Practices of Making
3. Dressing as Everyday Resistance: The Working-Class Hanbok Movement (1980s–2000s)
4. Ready-to-Wear Hanbok
5. Ot-Jieum as Practice: Cycle of Cutting, Stitching, Wearing, Mending
6. "Between Beings" Sai-Jonjae: Humans as In-between Beings
7. You Cannot Make Clothes Without Understanding the Body: Clothes Follow the Flow of Five Viscera
Interlude: Breath in Fabric
Part III. Weaving as Worlding
8. Salim on a Fabric Level: Mulkkuri Myeongju
9. Usage Salim
Part IV. Toward an Otherwise
10. From Hanbok to Uriot: Daily Embodied Transformation
11. Worlding Through Wearing: Exploring Alternative Perspectives
References
Product details
| Published | Dec 10 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9798216452225 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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