Wooyoungmi Fall 2022 Menswear Collection

Four white doors—fire doors, the kind that snap shut with a vengeance—inset in stud walls broke up the space in Paris’s Garage Amelot, the multi-story car park venue for the Wooyoungmi show. Each time a model walked through a door and let it close sharply behind them, a tone was simulated on the soundtrack, creating a score composed of slams. Founder Madame Woo, a keen reader, had been inspired for fall by Amor Towles’s 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow, in which an aristocratic count finds himself under house arrest in the Hotel Metropol Moscow in 1922, and is shifted from five-star suite to servant’s quarters. Hence the slamming doors.

And the balaclavas. Drawing an obvious parallel between the locked-in count and today’s locked-down Covid-struck communities across the world, Madame Woo’s keywords for the collection, communicated via an interpreter backstage, were “protection,” “humanity,” “elegance,” and “connections.” She imagined the count in cozy balaclavas and cropped knits, but still keeping up appearances, an impulse that resulted in a bright blue fuzzy mohair hood paired with a formal black suit, or a shrunken stripy vest over a beige single-breasted blazer and pleated trousers. Cropped volumes for both men and women were the big story, a contrast to previous seasons’ adherence to oversized shapes. Particularly contemporary combinations for minimalists seeking to soup up their classic wardrobe staples included a high-waisted, ankle-length denim skirt with a severely pruned black puffer jacket, and a short maroon flight jacket with hot pants and chunky knee-high boots (incidentally, on the streets and on the catwalks, hardcore, heavy-soled black boots aren’t going anywhere).

At a moment when Korean entertainment is gripping the world like never before (Netflix’s Squid Game, its biggest hit of 2021, watched by 142 million households in its first month, has been confirmed for a second season) perhaps it was a missed opportunity to base a collection on a Russian-themed novel with a color palette referencing Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Then again, as Madame Woo, who established her label in 2002, said herself: “Korean culture is experiencing a renaissance, but I am the one who developed K fashion.” In other words, she’s miles ahead.