Fiona Bae on K-Pop: "K-Pop often feels like it was made in a factory"

Fiona Bae, you wrote a book about K-Style, about how Korean pop culture became a phenomenon.

Among other things, it says that conscription in Korea made men interested in K-Beauty.

How do these worlds fit together?

Jennifer Wiebking

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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A stylist told me how he was a young man in the military a good 20 years ago and wasn't allowed to keep his cell phone there.

The men filled the many free evenings with reading fashion magazines such as “GQ”.

They were able to implement the beauty tips in particular in their free time.

The fact that many younger men have invested in their style can certainly be traced back to K-Pop and its idols.

BTS, the quintessential K-pop band, recently announced a hiatus.

The members have to join the military.

They were on the cover of "Vogue" and are certainly style role models for many fans in their suits.

But the BTS message has always been: Have faith in yourself!

This has touched young people all over the world.

Every Korean has to do this military service, so many K-pop stars have done it.

Many survived.

​How

A starting point was definitely the Korean wave Hallyu.

The Chinese media first used the term, and it was meant to sound derogatory, to describe the impact of K-pop on Chinese youth in the early 2000s.

Hence the wave, something that washes away everything else.

Was there a moment when you realized that your country's pop culture had become internationally famous?

In 2000 I moved from Seoul to Hong Kong for a year and was surprised to hear our music there, in the shops and in the cafes.

Up until that point, I didn't know our pop culture had spread so widely.

I thought: Wow, my country is cool.

Then it wasn't long before many other cultural themes got the K – K-Fashion, K-Beauty, K-Design.

The creative people who have their say in my book take a critical view of this.

The K became a marketing gimmick.

In your book you write that until then young Koreans had been brought up to behave as conformistly as possible.

Can you understand K-Pop as a backlash?

Not really, because the bridge between subculture and mainstream is stable in Korea.

There are always new trends that quickly find their way out of the niche.

This is also one of the criticisms of K-Pop, it often seems like it was made in a factory.

When it comes to looks, many of you leave nothing to chance, right?

Oh yes, when it comes to the number of cosmetic procedures, we end up in the top three in a global comparison.

As a Korean, I am also shocked by stories of young women who save up for an operation because they think this is the only way to get a good job.

It's an open secret that appearance is an important factor in job interviews.

Has K-Pop fueled this tendency or calmed it down?

He definitely increased the longing for beauty.

Young people see pictures of their idols and hope to look just as good.

You can tell by how quickly the clothes they wear sell out.

"K-Pop, K-Style - Music, Art & Fashion from South Korea" by Fiona Bae was published by Edel, 304 pages, 26 euros.