K-fashion E-tailers and Consumption in the Global Market

Korean popular music (K-pop) has gained global recognition in recent years, with a noteworthy effect on youth culture and lifestyle. In particular, fashion plays an extensive role in amplifying the identities of major K-pop artists as well as in the diffusion of Korean culture. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research on how K-pop artists’ fashion styles spread to the global market and how K-fashion e-tailers play a role in shaping the cultural images of Korea projected to a global audience. This chapter explores both the positive and negative impacts of K-fashion e-tailers. This study shows that K-fashion global e-tailers play an important role in connecting international subcultural communities by offering the latest K-pop artists’ fashion products and disseminating cultural news; however, current K-fashion retailers commonly offer replica K-pop fashion items with limited diversity in size, which implies highly constrained notions of beauty and stereotypically petite bodies as ideal.