The Mountain as Runway
In July 2018, Kiko Kostadinov — a London-based menswear designer whose work has since appeared in major international fashion publications — was walking through Seoul's Dongmyo flea market when he stopped and took photographs of strangers. Not models, not street style subjects curated for a magazine, but middle-aged Korean men going about their day in Gore-Tex jackets, waterproof hiking trousers, and technical boots with ankle support rated for terrain far more demanding than the urban flea market they were navigating. He posted the photographs to Instagram with the caption: "the best street in the world." The images traveled quickly through fashion circles internationally. The specific combination the photographs documented — vivid color-blocked technical fabrics, articulated waterproof shells, ergonomic packs, full deung-san regalia deployed in a flatmarket setting — was recognized by a fashion industry that had been trying, with varying success, to achieve something similar through deliberate design. These Korean men had simply been dressing this way for years, because this was how Koreans dressed.
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| The ajeossi on the Bukhansan ridge was not making a fashion statement. He was simply dressed correctly — and global fashion took twenty years to agree. |
The gorp-core aesthetic — functional, technical outdoor wear worn as everyday urban fashion — was named in 2017 by a New York Magazine writer and became one of global fashion's defining sensibilities of the 2020s. Celine, Gucci, and Balenciaga incorporated outdoor performance brands into runway collections. Arc'teryx and Salomon became luxury accessories brand equivalents. The North Face and Patagonia achieved status-signal velocity previously reserved for leather goods houses. All of this happened, to a significant degree, because global fashion finally caught up to what Korean middle-aged men had been wearing to the mountain — and to the supermarket, and to the restaurant, and to the weekend errand — for decades. The ajeossi on the Bukhansan trail in his 680-dollar Gore-Tex shell was not making a fashion statement. He was simply dressed correctly for his weekend, and his definition of "correctly" happened to anticipate the global fashion consensus by approximately twenty years.
Why Korea Developed This Relationship With the Mountain
Approximately 70 percent of the Korean peninsula is mountainous, a geographic reality that shapes the relationship between Korean people and outdoor terrain in fundamental ways. Seoul alone has more than 100 mountains accessible within or near city limits. Bukhansan National Park — at 836 meters, the highest point in the Seoul metropolitan area — is reachable by subway from central Seoul in under an hour, and records millions of visitors annually. Dobongsan, Inwangsan, Gwanaksan: these are not remote destinations requiring special transport or planning. They are the city's green infrastructure, the urban escape valve, the weekend default for a population that has built mountain access into the practical logic of its capital.
Korean hiking culture experienced its first major expansion in the late 1980s, when rising living standards and the civic energy of the 1988 Seoul Olympics expanded people's sense of leisure possibility. A second boom arrived unexpectedly from the 1997 Asian financial crisis: with discretionary spending compressed and private clubs and restaurants less accessible, mountain hiking emerged as an affordable, dignified weekend activity that required investment in equipment rather than ongoing operational cost. The equipment investment, once made, became a form of visible commitment — and commitment, in Korean social culture, tends to escalate. If you were going to hike, you were going to hike correctly. And hiking correctly meant being dressed correctly. The outdoor apparel brands that surrounded every major trailhead entrance understood this from the beginning and built retail clusters at trail starts that functioned as much as wardrobe destinations as as practical supply stops.
The Market That Built Itself on a Mountain
Korea's outdoor apparel market reached 6 trillion won — approximately 4.62 billion US dollars — in 2023, up from around 2.4 trillion won in 2020. This nearly threefold expansion happened during a period when the global outdoor industry was growing steadily but not at comparable rates, driven in Korea by a specific combination of cultural factors: the pandemic's elevation of outdoor activity as social practice, the cross-generational legitimization of hiking as a lifestyle anchor, and the transfer of gorp-core's global fashion credibility back into a market where the underlying habits had long predated the trend.
The domestic brands that built this market are serious operations. Blackyak, founded in 1973, holds a Gore-Tex license and works with performance material partners including Cordura, Kevlar, PrimaLoft, and Polartec. Its Black Yak Alpine Club — an online hiking community and app launched as a marketing initiative — grew from 40,000 members in 2020 to more than 200,000 within a year, generating viral content through its "100 Best Mountains of Korea" challenge. K2 and NEPA compete at the premium end of the technical gear market. Kolon Sport, established in the same year as Blackyak, has launched a minimal technical capsule line called LTEKS that explicitly bridges outdoor function and urban wearability. The North Face's Korea sales rose 40 percent year-on-year as gorp-core entered its global peak. Kolon Sport reported a 140 percent increase in operating profits in the same period. Over 60 percent of hiking apparel purchased in Korea is now worn daily, not exclusively on mountain trails.
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| Over 60% of hiking apparel in Korea is worn daily. The mountain and the city street are the same context. |
The Trail as Status Performance
The specific social logic of Korean hiking fashion requires some unpacking, because it is not reducible to either pure vanity or pure function. The Korean trail operates as a status performance environment in which the visual legibility of technical knowledge — expressed through gear choices — functions as a form of social communication as precise as any other form of dress code. A Gore-Tex jacket at 680 dollars communicates something specific on Bukhansan that it does not communicate in a different context: not wealth alone, but a particular kind of seriousness, a commitment to doing this activity correctly, a resistance to the improvised or the casual approach that jeans and a cotton t-shirt would signal. "It's not cheap, but everyone dresses this way and I don't want to look out of place," one middle-aged hiker told Arab News. "Anyway, it's good quality and comfortable."
This dual justification — social conformity and genuine technical function — is the central architecture of Korean hiking fashion culture. The Gore-Tex really does perform better in Korea's unpredictable seasonal weather: the country experiences significant temperature variance between seasons, high humidity in summer, genuine cold in winter, and the rapid weather changes that mountain microclimates produce. The waterproof shell that reads as an aesthetic choice in Dongmyo genuinely earns its rating on the Bukhansan ridge in November. Korean hikers are not performing technical knowledge they do not possess. Many of them are genuinely skilled mountaineers who hike multiple times per week across terrain that justifies the equipment. A 53-year-old high school teacher who hikes Bukhansan's different ridges and peaks most weekends is not overdressed. She is appropriately dressed for the activity she genuinely pursues, and her wardrobe reflects this.
The New Generation's Reinterpretation
What has changed with gorp-core's global arrival is the generational ownership of what was previously an older Korean aesthetic. Young Korean outdoor brands born in the past five years — Somewhere Outside Hiking Company, founded in 2023 and already collaborating with French mountaineering label Millet; Welter Experiment, which positions itself at the intersection of concrete and forest — have taken the technical fabric heritage and the hiking culture that produced the ajeossi's reputation and reframed it for an urban-young aesthetic vocabulary. The result is gear that performs on the mountain but photographs on the city street: cleaner silhouettes, more restrained color deployment, a sophistication that reads as deliberate design intention rather than accumulated equipment ownership.
The outdoor apparel market's gorp-core segment is projected to grow 15 to 20 percent annually through 2026 in Korea, driven by youth demographics and the sustainability positioning that technical performance fabrics — recycled polyester, bio-based Gore-Tex alternatives — increasingly support. Seoul has opened a Hiking Tourism Center at Bukhansan providing free gear rental for foreign visitors, an institutional acknowledgment that deung-san has become urban tourism content. The mountain trail is now a destination in the same sense that the pop-up store street is a destination: a specific experience of Seoul that is not available elsewhere, conducted by people who are, without exception, dressed for it.
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| Gimbap from a foil pouch. Baegundae summit. 40 minutes from the city center. Both elements of this picture are entirely deliberate. |
The View From the Top
On a clear morning at the summit of Baegundae — Bukhansan's highest peak at 836 meters — the view extends across the full sprawl of Seoul: apartment towers rising into the distance, the Han River a silver band through the middle distance, Lotte World Tower visible in the south. The hikers who arrive at this view after a three to four hour climb are, as a group, extraordinarily well-equipped. Poles with ergonomic grips. Multi-layer breathable base systems under color-blocked shells. Boots with outsoles rated for granite. The effect, when you look at them against the panorama of the city they just walked out of, is a specific Seoul aesthetic that no other city produces: ten million people below, and a dozen people at the top dressed as though they were planning to keep going into the Himalayas, eating gimbap from a foil pouch, entirely comfortable with both elements of this combination.
The trail ahead is marked and maintained and beautiful. The gear is specific and technical and expensive. The city below is vast and connected and constantly changing. And the person looking at all of it from above is dressed exactly right for every part of the picture, simultaneously.
What would it change about your relationship to a city if you could look down at it from a granite summit forty minutes from the city center — and if dressing for that experience were simply the standard?
Continue your journey into Korean life below:
- culture / insight / k-culture / ktodayApr 6, 2026
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- culture / insight / k-culture / ktodayApr 6, 2026
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