Dior inaugurated a new concept store in the district of Seongsu-dong, Seoul
With Covid-19 closures in Beijing tightening and Shanghai entering its fifth week of lockdown, the capital city of one of its Asian neighbours, South Korea, is basking in the limelight of a daring new store opening and its first-ever fashion show from luxury heavyweight Dior.
The fall show, held on Saturday on the hilly and lush campus of Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, had the firepower of Blackpink star and Dior global ambassador Jisoo (59.7 million Instagram followers), who was wearing black lace and tulle from the collection presented on the runway, with K-pop celebrities, rappers and actors including Bae Suzy, Oh Se-hun, Jung Hae-in and Yeri. Korean female skateboarders opened and closed the show doing tricks on ramps across the catwalk, clad in jumpsuits labelled with the Dior family business logo, “l’union fait la force” (united we stand), referencing the sisterhood spirit Dior’s artistic director for women’s collections Maria Grazia Chiuri has been touting since her beginnings at Dior. The designer retrieved it from the archives. The 136-year-old women's university, whose vision is women’s education and gender equality, was chosen by Chiuri. The house also partners with Ewha as part of its Women@Dior mentoring programme. After the show, Chuiri took her bow in the university’s green and white teddy jacket.
“When I arrived, I fell completely in love with the jacket. I said I would like to stay here like a student, so I decided to dress myself like it,” Chiuri said during a conversation with students on Sunday. “You are a rock star at Ewha,” the university president Eun Mee Kim told her. Meanwhile, before the show, students stopped Dior chairman and CEO Pietro Beccari to take pictures with him. “I have become a sort of celebrity here since Jisoo has put me in the newspaper,” he says with a laugh.
Sitting down with Vogue Business on a university bench between the two shows (around 150 guests for each, with a mix of celebrities and top clients), Beccari said: “We wanted to thank our Korean audience; Korea is one of the countries with the highest growth potential, and it’s also a trendsetting country — we have seen in cinema and the Oscar award they won, with Squid Game, Kpop. Blackpink and BTS are unbelievable.”
South Korea accounts for 5 to 6 per cent of total personal luxury goods spending worldwide, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Edouard Aubin, which is slightly more than the French market, the fashion cradle. With ongoing lockdowns in China and a Japanese market still devoid of tourists where HSBC analyst Erwan Rambourg suggests “there is not a lot of customer recruitment to be done”, Korea is standing out as a beacon for luxury consumption for the Asia-Pacific region, despite its relatively small 51 million population. And while it was once a profitable duty-free shopping location for Chinese tourists, even without that because of Covid-19, the local population and trendsetting influence make it an increasingly important destination.
“The Korean market is important, period. But it’s clear that we take advantage of the growth here to compensate for some of the challenges in China,” Beccari says. Beccari is optimistic about China, though: “The curve of turnover follows exactly the curve of traffic in store,” which suggests that the current challenges are “not a long-term phenomenon”. He also sees Korea as a lab for trends, notably on all things digital.
Dior Couture is LVMH’s second-largest fashion brand after Louis Vuitton, generating sales of €6.53 billion in 2021, according to estimates from HSBC global head of consumer and retail research Erwan Rambourg. That represents around 10 per cent of total LVMH revenues. In addition, Parfums Christian Dior, led by president and CEO Laurent Kleitman, generated €3.04 billion of sales in 2021, leaving a total of €9.6 billion.
The fall collection (the equivalent of the pre-fall collection at Dior) had a punk vibe, with Chiuri playing with the notion of uniforms. It premiered in Korean stores on Sunday before it rolls out worldwide on 5 May. “The aim is to stage a show for the fall collection that usually doesn’t have a show. We did it in Shanghai last year and in Seoul this year,” says Beccari. It’s also a testimony of the executive’s commitment to physical shows: Chiuri’s cruise show is planned for Spain’s pretty Andalusian capital Seville on 16 June.
Images courtesy of: Choi Na Rang