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Worlding Hanbok

Reimagining Korean Clothing

Worlding Hanbok cover

Worlding Hanbok

Reimagining Korean Clothing

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Pre-order. Available 12 Nov 2026
£64.80 RRP £81.00 Website price saving £16.20 (20%)

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Description

What did Koreans wear before t-shirts and jeans and what futures might still be woven into those garments?

Once an everyday attire shaped by climate and agrarian life, hanbok has been pushed to the margins of museums and fashion shows. Yet in grassroots movements and experimental practices, it is being revived as a site of quiet resistance.

At the heart of Worlding Hanbok is Lee Ki-Yeon, an activist, who during South Korea's 1980s dictatorship initiated a movement of wearing earth-toned, oversized farmers' hanboks as a symbol of solidarity and renewal. These hanboks were not only structurally ecological – they were crafted to enable generous sharing of garments, embodying values of energetic circulation, material activity, and collaborative inhabitation.

Through embodied ethnography and fieldwork across hanbok workshops, a weaving facility, online hanbok communities, and a textile lab in Potsdam, anthropologist Yoonha Kim shows how the making and wearing of hanbok enacts alternative ways of knowing, being, and relating.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • PDF/UA-2, 1.4
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

Has alternative text descriptions for images

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order

Table of Contents

Preface: Flow of the Wind

Part I. Framing the Practice
1. Introduction - Worlding Hanbok
2. Enclothed Exploration: Wearing as a Method
Interlude: Meeting Lee Ki-Yeon
Part II. Politics and Practices of Making
3. Dressing as Everyday Resistance: The Working-Class Hanbok Movement (1980s–2000s)
4. Ready-to-Wear Hanbok
5. Ot-Jieum as Practice: Cycle of Cutting, Stitching, Wearing, Mending
6. "Between Beings" Sai-Jonjae: Humans as In-between Beings
7. You Cannot Make Clothes Without Understanding the Body: Clothes Follow the Flow of Five Viscera
Interlude: Breath in Fabric
Part III. Weaving as Worlding
8. Salim on a Fabric Level: Mulkkuri Myeongju
9. Usage Salim
Part IV. Toward an Otherwise
10. From Hanbok to Uriot: Daily Embodied Transformation
11. Worlding Through Wearing: Exploring Alternative Perspectives

References

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 12 Nov 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 256
ISBN 9798216452256
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Yoonha Kim

Yoonha Kim is a Korean anthropologist with a backg…

Author

Yoonha Kim

Yoonha Kim is a Korean anthropologist with a backg…

Author

Yoonha Kim

Yoonha Kim is a Korean anthropologist with a backg…

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