Worlding Hanbok

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, hanboks have been pushed to the margins of museums and fashion shows. Yet grassroots movements and experimental practices are reviving the hanbok as a site of 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 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 hanboks enact alternative ways of knowing, being, and relating.