Where to Shop in SeoulStreetwear, stationery stores, and much more beyond.
Where to Shop in SeoulStreetwear, stationery stores, and much more beyond.
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Gentle Monster
In 2017, Hypebeast reported that eyewear brand Gentle Monster employed just six people to design its products but 60 to design its stores. With branches now cropping up all over the world, it’s a number that has likely only grown since then. Founded in 2011, Gentle Monster is one of the great retail success stories of recent years and their eclectic and immersive store designs have been central in establishing the brand’s identity. Their four stores in Seoul (of the 68 worldwide) include the flagship in Hongdae, where installations change every 25 days, and the experimental HAUS in Dosan—a purpose-built building shared with sister brands Tamburins and experimental pâtissier Nudake—which frequently features installations that take advantage of the brand’s recent acquisition of a robotics company. (GU)
50 Apgujeong-ro 46-gil, Gangnam District
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Ader Error
There’s often a line to enter the Seongsu showroom of Ader Error, and it seems that most of the people waiting are not interested in the clothes; inside, a sequence of immersive installations—a crater left in the floor by a meteor strike, a headless spaceman floating weightless, a bubbling pool with a paddling spacecraft—are primed for social media. Ader Error was established in 2014 by an anonymous team with backgrounds ranging from finance to architecture. The core team remains both anonymous and committed to the brand’s founding vision: that it was never intended to only be dedicated to fashion. That’s fortunate, since few visitors seem to stay to browse the oversize, unisex clothing that once led GQ to ask if Ader Error were the world’s coolest brand, but that’s beside the point. As a spokesperson for the brand told Korea JoongAng Daily when the Seongsu location opened in 2021, “Conveying our brand values through the online shop only goes so far.” (GU)
82 Seongsui-ro, Seongdong District
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POST POETICS: Independent bookstore Post Poetics stocks English language books on art, architecture, fashion, design and photography that are imported in collaboration with an international network of publishers. The store, which moved to its current location in Hannam in 2022, aims to offer a space for cultural exchange between Korea and artistic communities around the world. (GU) 19 Itaewon-ro 54-gil, Yongsan District
TAMBURINS: Since it launched in 2017, Tamburins has carved a place for itself in the saturated K-beauty industry thanks to its chic, genderless cosmetics and store design. Like parent company Gentle Monster, the shops blur the distinction between art gallery and retail space—their flagship Hannam store, for example, features giant fabric pumpkins and knitted wall coverings. (GU) 238 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan District
SAYTOUCHÉ: Saytouché is a lifestyle brand created by Lee Chan-hyuk of pop duo AKMU and photographer Jaeryn Lim. Their store showcases a variety of idiosyncratic homewares and decorative objects, including a “Liquified Persian Rug” and a mirror that makes it seem as if you are on a video call with a cat. (RR) 53 Noksapyeong-daero 32-gil, Yongsan District
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Jimbba
Makgeolli has been brewed in Korea for at least a thousand years. The ease of producing the cloudy white rice wine—you just need to steam rice, mix it with water and nuruk (a fermentation starter made from wheat) and leave it to ferment in a clay pot—meant that it has long been considered a working-class drink. But over the centuries, countless techniques and recipes have been developed across the Korean Peninsula and handed down through generations. It was still the most popular alcoholic drink in South Korea in the 1960s, having survived the ban on home brewing during the Japanese occupation, but from the 1970s it began to fall out of fashion and was replaced by beer.
It was in part a response to the threat of these regional recipes dying out that bar and bottle shop Jimbba was founded. Named after the bicycle couriers who would once deliver rice wine from breweries, the shop—next to Sindang Central Market—stocks makgeolli, yakju (filtered makgeolli) and soju (a distilled yakju, that’s akin to sake) that the owners discover on research trips around Korea. They also document traditional recipes that they share via an online magazine. The store is part of a wave of interest in traditional Korean rice wine that has been compared to the renewed engagement with craft beer or natural wine. But the trend is unique for the way innovative and creative new breweries, bars and bottle shops are working to conserve a vital part of Korean heritage. (GU)
15-8 Toegye-ro 87-gil, Jung District
THREE MORE…
POST POETICS: Independent bookstore Post Poetics stocks English language books on art, architecture, fashion, design and photography that are imported in collaboration with an international network of publishers. The store, which moved to its current location in Hannam in 2022, aims to offer a space for cultural exchange between Korea and artistic communities around the world. (GU) 19 Itaewon-ro 54-gil, Yongsan District
TAMBURINS: Since it launched in 2017, Tamburins has carved a place for itself in the saturated K-beauty industry thanks to its chic, genderless cosmetics and store design. Like parent company Gentle Monster, the shops blur the distinction between art gallery and retail space—their flagship Hannam store, for example, features giant fabric pumpkins and knitted wall coverings. (GU) 238 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan District
SAYTOUCHÉ: Saytouché is a lifestyle brand created by Lee Chan-hyuk of pop duo AKMU and photographer Jaeryn Lim. Their store showcases a variety of idiosyncratic homewares and decorative objects, including a “Liquified Persian Rug” and a mirror that makes it seem as if you are on a video call with a cat. (RR) 53 Noksapyeong-daero 32-gil, Yongsan District
There are around 350 art posters on display in Kuna Jangrong.
The third floor of Point of View was originally an apartment. Its interior has been preserved.
The D&Department concession in the Millimeter Milligram store in Itaewon.
MMMG
Millimeter Milligram, or mmmg, was founded as a design studio in 1999 with the principle that small but carefully considered objects can enrich our lives. The original range of stationery has since expanded into a store in Itaewon in a building shared with Anthracite coffee shop. Here, mmmg products are sold alongside accessories, homewares and furniture curated by the studio, such as Arita porcelain from Japan and recycled Freitag bags. The studio also hosts collaborations and pop-ups with local producers and runs a program through its D&Department subsidiary to find uniquely Korean products that are durable and make use of traditional crafts. (GU)
240 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan District
Kuna Jangrong
Only a poster for a 1965 Alexander Calder exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, displayed in the second floor window of a brick building in Seongsu, gives any indication that you have arrived at cult art-poster store Kuna Jangrong. There—providing you have made an appointment online—you can browse a range of exhibition posters collected from around the world by founder Kim Kuna. As well as rare and limited edition runs, there is an exclusive range of posters designed in-house and a rotating exhibition dedicated to a different artist each month. (GU)
2F, 7 Yeonmujang 7ga-gil, Seongdong District
Point of View
Stationery store Point of View moved to its current site in Seongsu in 2022. Conceived by design studio Atelier Écriture, the shop is split across three levels. The first floor is dedicated to everyday stationery and can get busy—a reflection of its renown online—but the second, which has a more refined selection of notebooks, accessories and wrapping paper, and the third, where there is luxury stationery, artwork and homewares in a wood-paneled, domestic setting, are quieter and lend themselves better to slow, peaceful browsing. (GU)
18 Yeonmujang-gil, Seongdong District
