• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.31-47
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• 2019

This study focuses on women and fashion in Korea between the 1960s and 1970s, when the government regulated the socio-cultural aspects of individuals while achieving remarkable economic industrialization, particularly through the representative popular weekly magazine 'Sunday-Seoul'. The scope of this study included 168 issues from September 22, 1968 to December 26, 1971. Two research methods were applied, literature research and content analysis research. First, the literature on Korean society, culture, women's fashion, the sociological, feminine and popular cultural studies were reviewed. Thereafter, the contents, cover, articles, pictorials were collected and analyzed for classification and identification of the women's images and women's fashion. In the case of fashion articles, the contents of vocabulary and description texts were highlighted, and in the case of pictorials, the visual elements such as images, silhouettes of clothes, details of features, and patterns of materials were assessed. The images of women in Sunday Seoul's articles and pictorials exhibited extreme opposite, presenting the most important purpose of marriage, 'wise mother and good wife' and 'image of sexual object' for men. The two images of women differed; however, there was one more female image 'industrial laborer' which was placed in the blind spot of interest. The characteristics of fashion which appeared in 'Sunday-Seoul' were 'uniform modern elegance' based on neat mini-style, and 'sexual image of exposure fashion' which endeavored to selectively borrow from overseas pictorials and trend-oriented articles. This could be viewed as a 'transformation of traditional Hanbok', 'avant-garde trend' and 'de-sexualization & indifference of fashion'.