From Embarrassing to Elite: How Korea's "Ajumma Fashion" Took Over the World

For years, I dreaded traveling abroad with older relatives. You'd spot them from a mile away in any airport: Korean tourists in their 60s and 70s, dressed head-to-toe in bright, technical hiking gear — as if they were about to summit a mountain rather than board a flight to Paris. I remember feeling genuinely embarrassed. Why do our elders insist on dressing like this everywhere they go?

I'm not embarrassed anymore. Mostly because the rest of the world caught up.

Hiking Wear Becomes "Gorpcore"

The global fashion term is "gorpcore" — a blend of GORP (the trail-mix snack hikers carry) and "normcore." It refers to technical outdoor clothing worn as everyday streetwear, and it's been one of the defining trends of the past several years, embraced by everyone from Drake to Travis Scott.

The term itself wasn't coined in Korea. But Korea's relationship to this look runs deeper than most places. Back in the late 2000s, an outdoor-wear boom swept every generation in Korea — hiking brands became so mainstream that wearing them had nothing to do with actually hiking. For years afterward, that same look became a punchline: the stereotypical "uncle style" (ajae-look), something younger Koreans actively avoided.

Then two things happened at once. Internationally, fashion insiders started paying attention to Korean street style specifically — in 2018, designer Kiko Kostadinov visited Seoul's Dongmyo flea market and posted about it on Instagram, captioning it "best street in the world." Domestically, a wave of young Koreans took up hiking during the pandemic and, almost overnight, decided the gear their parents had been mocked for wearing was actually cool. The exact same jackets that once got eye-rolls from teenagers became something their kids wanted to borrow.

Elderly Koreans traveling abroad in hiking gear

From "Uncle Shoes" to Maison Margiela Collabs

The same reversal happened with footwear. Salomon trail shoes and New Balance's chunkier models were, for years, considered strictly "ajusshi shoes" in Korea — comfortable, unfashionable, the kind of thing your father wore. I remember thinking of them exactly that way myself.

Now Salomon has collaborated with Maison Margiela on shoes that resell for hundreds of dollars, and New Balance has become one of the most sought-after sneaker brands among Korean twenty- and thirty-somethings, with limited releases selling out and reselling well above retail. Fashion commentary in Korea now openly describes both brands as having gone from "dad shoes" to generational icons — practically overnight, by fashion-cycle standards.

A scene where outdoor wear has become everyday fashion

The Kimjang Vest That Became a $4,500 Valentino Piece

But nothing captures this reversal quite like what happened to the kimjang vest.

If you've ever helped with Korean kimchi-making season, you know this vest: a quilted, floral-print vest that's been a practical, unglamorous piece of winter workwear for decades, sold in traditional markets for the equivalent of $4 to $8. It's the kind of thing your grandmother wears while elbow-deep in cabbage and chili paste — not exactly a fashion statement.

Then K-pop stars — aespa's Karina, BLACKPINK's Jennie, Girls' Generation's Taeyeon — started wearing versions of it casually, and it exploded on social media under names like "grandma core" and "halmaenial" (a blend of "halmoni," or grandmother, and "millennial"). Search interest in the vest reportedly jumped by hundreds of percent in a single month.

Making kimchi while wearing a kimchi-making vest

And then Valentino released a nearly identical quilted, floral vest — priced at roughly ₩6.3 million (about $4,500 USD). Moncler followed with its own version at around ₩2.3 million. Korean social media reaction was, understandably, gleeful: "Our grandmothers were ahead of fashion the whole time." "The kimjang vest is about to tour Europe." "The design is familiar. The price is not." Adidas jumped in too, releasing a floral quilted jacket around ₩150,000 that reportedly sold out almost immediately.

The trend even had an unglamorous side effect: some small business owners started reporting that the cheap, genuine "grandma vests" they kept in-store for staff or customers kept mysteriously disappearing — presumably taken by people chasing the real, five-dollar version of what luxury houses were now selling for thousands.

What This Actually Says

I don't think this is really a story about fashion cycles repeating themselves, though that's part of it. It's more that an entire generation's uncool, unfashionable, "who would wear that" wardrobe — hiking gear, sturdy walking shoes, quilted market vests — turns out to have been quietly practical and distinctive all along. It just took the rest of the world, and eventually Korea's own younger generation, a couple of decades to notice.

I still don't own a floral kimjang vest. But I'll admit, the next time I see my mother-in-law in her hiking gear at the airport, I'm going to look a little more closely at the jacket.

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This piece reflects on real, well-documented fashion trends — the "gorpcore" movement, the "dad shoe" reversal of Salomon and New Balance, and the Valentino/Moncler kimjang vest moment — from my own perspective as someone who used to find this exact wardrobe mortifying.