Anchovi
By Noemi Soloperto
November 30, 2020
From Seoul straight to your heart.
The sweet words written by the designer Kwun Hyuk are not enough to recount Anchovi, his brand. It’s essential to fully plunge into a Korean vintage market and letting oneself go, smelling its fragrances and fantasizing about passers-by stories.
Kwun releases his creative nostalgia in Anchovi clothes with the aim of stimulating a sensorial connection with fond memories of bygone days: he mixes perfumes and childhood props to remind others of their youth in an amusing way. The Walkman example clearly explains the brand’s philosophy: the cassette player, by now obsolete and superseded by newer technologies, was an object used by many of us; now, elements kept alive in collective memory are employed in various projects of different kinds, to help people relate with those days.
The brand’s name, likewise, is an astral journey through the designer’s own childhood memories: “I don’t like taking things seriously, it’s what happened when I choose the name”. Such a crazy dream has led Kwun to the time when he was a kid and used to eat many anchovies with his parents to keep himself healthy.
Adolescence reminiscences merge with cues from vintage movies, reinterpreted with an Asian sensibility: Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The last emperor” is, indeed, the cornerstone of the latest collection, SS21, available for preorder since a few days. Kwun’s refined Korean mind has objectively studied the movie’s understanding of Chinese modernization, connecting with it and thoroughly expressing its stylistic canons on the ADV editorial, in which he recreates an Oriental atmosphere through objects and accessories purchased in Korean markets.
Anchovi is an archive of life, for both who creates it and who wears it.
