Let’s start by talking about the beautiful and talented figure skater Kim Yu-na, who if you have been living under a rock for the past year, won a gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics this year. She’s my type of girl, talented beyond belief and super fashionable. When she is not skating, she can be seen endorsing her very own phone for Samsung known as Yuna’s Haptic, I need to get my hands on one of those!
Anyway, most recently she was the head-liner of Festa on Ice and she decided to wear outfits designed by the Korean designer Lie Sang Bong. It’s really great she’s choosing to represent Korean fashion and Lie Sang Bong is such a hot choice right now.
Lie Sang Bong is known as the ‘McQueen of Korea’ and you can see why. He has dressed some top celebs including Beyonce and Lindsay Lohan. If you’ve seen some of his work it will come as no surprise to you that the uber- fashion forward Lady GaGa has even taken a liking to his work. She stepped out in a laser-cut confection from his fall 2009 collection during a trip to Seoul last year.
He has being showing at the Paris fashion shows for years now and each year his collections are more and more widely received. This year his Spring Summer 2010 Collection gained huge admiration. His theme was the futuristic woman (think Balmain goes to Korea). The collection was inspired by the classic sci-fi book series ” Dune” by Frank Herbert.
What is so great about Lie Sang Bong is that he takes a really classic look and gives it an exciting, modern twist. The one shoulder look played a really big part in this collection and is already being transferred to the high streets of Korea. A whole load of the looks also used safety pins as decoration, very punky!
Apparently Lie originally wanted to be an actor but luckily for all of us fashionitas he gave up on that dream and enrolled himself in fashion school and debued his first collection at Seoul Fashion Week in 1993.
Through his work Lie has done the important thing of trying to bridge the gap between the East and the West. Ah ha I always knew fashion could stop conflict! Over his many years of designing, he has made references to hangul ( the native alphabet of the Korean language), tigers and other Korean references.
What isn’t there to love about a designer who stays true to his Korean roots and brings amazing fashion to the rest of the world?
