What is Seoul Fashion? Material and Immaterial Production of Fashion Districts

This study contextualizes the multifaceted and evolving nature of Seoul’s contemporary urban landscape as an emerging fashion city. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across the fashion industry and related institutions along with field observations, the research investigates how practices of diverse actors including fashion brands, intermediaries, policies, media, and visitors situated around fashion districts coalesce to produce and represent “Seoul fashion,” which reflects a hybrid of the design fashion city and symbolic fashion city. Findings demonstrate that fashion districts serve as curated milieus shaped by the reciprocal reinforcement of brand and district identities, engagement with brands, intermediaries, and visitors, trans-regional circulation facilitated by online media, global popularity of Korean culture, and strategic integration of urban policies. At the same time, the study identifies ongoing challenges, such as the instability of Seoul Fashion Week and the rapid pace of trend change that complicate efforts to consolidate Seoul’s urban identity as an established fashion city. This study contributes to the growing body of research through an empirical investigation of a new fashion city case, extending scholarship at the intersection of experiential fashion consumption and urban studies, and providing practical insights for fashion industry insiders, urban policymakers, and tourism boards.