Couture Designer Jisoo Baik Sees Clothes as Floating Architecture
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When couture designer Jisoo Baik found herself seated between Jean-Paul Gaultier and Jeremy Scott at Björk’s orchestra concert, she was hit by the enormity of the moment.
“I was overwhelmed and appreciative to her stylist [Edda Gudmundsdottir] because they are really open-minded to young designers,” said Paris-based Baik, who will be making her couture debut on Tuesday. “They really opened the brand to everyone who is interested in design.”
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Only months prior, the Icelandic musician, then preparing for the release of her 2022 “Fossora” album, had made an immediate beeline toward a lightweight and delicate structure that seem to float around the human form — one of Baik’s designs, from her graduate collection at the Institut Français de la Mode, inspired by the idea of safety and protection.
Beyond requesting more draping, Björk gave Baik nearly free reign on the design — “not even a color or a really detailed brief,” said the designer, who was born and raised in South Korea.
Archival couture from the 1930s to 1960s is a major influence in her work, but she traces her passion for design back to her 15-year-old self’s discovery of the film of Alexander McQueen’s spring 1999 “No. 13” runway show, with its finale of car manufacturing robots spray painting Shalom Harlow’s dress.
As a child, Baik had been drawn to music but her mother, a homemaker who went to be an artist with a number of exhibitions to her name, spotted her young daughter’s talent for sketching.
Meanwhile, the future designer’s classmates tapped into her knack for putting outfits together. “I was just really enjoying [styling] them so my mother encouraged me to push in that direction,” she recalled, saying she enrolled in art-focused middle and high schools before heading to Seoul’s Dongduk University to major in fashion design.
After that, Central Saint Martins felt like the logical destination. “I really wanted to go to London and study abroad because I wanted to study more about my design and fashion with wider eyes,” she said. There, one of her professors suggested that the South Korean designer further her studies in France and recommended the IFM’s new program.
That’s what she did straight after completing the London institution’s graduate program, enrolling in what would be the French fashion school’s first fashion masters’ class, an experience she described as enriching on a professional and personal level.
After her 2021 IFM graduation, Baik went on to work at Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and Mugler, experiences that taught her much, starting with the idea that “design is not everything to carry a house and company,” she said. As such, she stressed that graduates and fashion students should take on such experiences even when planning to make their own brands.
But it also reinforced her idea that her path lay outside the studios of bold-faced names. “Every time I was doing some design or mockup, I realized I had my own specific style, not really following the house style,” she said. “Don’t lose your own style when working for a house.”
In her case, it was making pieces that are more than clothes and closer to “art pieces that can stand on their own,” she said. “It’s like floating architecture.”
For her couture debut, she’ll be delving further the sculptural wirework that caught the eye of Björk and, most recently, pop star Ariana Grande. Paired with delicate lace and silk jerseys, she intends them walk a tightrope between being delicate and substantial, sensual and protective.
Her intention is to be “a new couture designer and some kind of sensation of haute couture,” a path she expects to pursue for the foreseeable future in Paris. While that will remain her primary focus, she revealed she is already developing footwear, with two styles of heels that will be commercialized in coming months.
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