• Journal of Fashion Business
• /
• v.21 no.1
• /
• pp.12-31
• /
• 2017

Korean commercial-organized girl groups were remarkable in the late 1990's. However, by the late 2000's, girl groups had an even more profound effect on Korean popular music compare to past influences. This study aimed to analyze the social-cultural meaning of the changing appearance of girl group between the first and second-generations. For this purpose, this study analyzed media image and text, based on a social-cultural context, about 13 girl groups. The results are as follows. First, while the first -generation girl group tended to maintain girlish/sexy images trying to the male desire, the second -generation girl group strategically showed various sexual identities such as femininity, masculinity, masculinity and androgyny along with contextual sexual images. The reason why girl groups increased the number of strategic images featuring various sexual identities was in order to appeal to a wide, diverse audience. Second, the second generation girl groups had - slim bodies with great athleticism, basically due to trainee system. Because of this, their semiotic body images have been commercially used to promote the consumption. Third, the second generation girl groups - were the bigger stars than first generation girl groups - because the members worked in many different fields. Therefore, the group members' images were successful consumed directly and then reproduced symbolically. Fourth, each member of the second -generation girl groups characterized by appearing in diverse, yet familiar images, through various media sources. Although the intention of this was to have recognition and popularity, it became difficult for them to change their image once one particular image was deemed popular.

• Journal of Fashion Business
• /
• v.28 no.3
• /
• pp.104-121
• /
• 2024

This study examined the integration of futurist fashion in 4th-generation K-pop girl groups, focusing on their world views, music videos, and fashion images. The key aim was to identify and analyze distinctive elements of futurist fashion within K-pop. K-pop's global popularity is driven by dynamic music, choreography, and avant-garde fashion. Futurism, an art movement emphasizing technology and innovation, continues to influence contemporary fashion trends in K-pop. This study seeks to provide insights into symbolic meanings and expressions of futurist fashion in 4th generation K-pop girl groups. Groups such as Gidle, Aespa, IVE, LE SSERAFIM, and New Jeans were analyzed. Data were collected from their music videos, lyrics, and costumes, focusing on silhouette, color, material, and pattern. This study highlights the significant role of futurist fashion in K-pop, showing how 4th-generation girl groups lead in integrating these elements. This research provides valuable insights for understanding and further exploring the evolution of K-pop fashion.

• Journal of Platform Technology
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.12-23
• /
• 2023

In the 2020s, the K-Pop market has been dominated by girl groups over boy groups and the fourth generation over the third generation. This paper presents methods and results on lyric clustering to investigate whether the generation of girl groups has started to change. We collected meta-information data for 1469 songs of 47 groups released from 2013 to 2022 and classified them into lyric information and non-lyric meta-information and quantified them respectively. The lyrics information was preprocessed by applying word-translation frequency vectorization based on previous studies and then selecting only the top vector values. Non-lyric meta-information was preprocessed and applied with One-Hot Encoding to reduce the bias of using only lyric information and show better clustering results. The clustering performance on the preprocessed data is 129%, 45% higher for Spherical K-Means' Silhouette Score and Calinski-Harabasz Score, respectively, compared to Hierarchical Clustering. This paper is expected to contribute to the study of Korean popular song development and girl group lyrics analysis and clustering.