Advertisement infeed Desk

Digital Trendsetters: How Korea Shapes Global Gen Z Social Media

Seoul Isn't Just Trending, It's Setting the Curriculum

Every generation has a place it looks to for cues on how to dress, what to film, and what counts as aspirational. For a growing number of Gen Z users worldwide, that place is increasingly Seoul. Not because of a single viral moment, but because the city has become something closer to a continuously updated reference manual, a place where new formats, aesthetics, and routines get tested, refined, and exported at a pace few other cities can match.

Smartphone capturing a viral video moment on a colorful Seoul street at night
A single phone in Seoul can shape what millions watch tomorrow


The Format Factory: How Seoul Shapes What Gets Made

Take the "Get Ready With Me" video, one of the most durable formats in social media history. The hashtag #GRWM has accumulated more than 165 billion views on TikTok, with roughly 100 billion of those views coming in a single recent year as the format experienced a fresh resurgence. While GRWM videos originated on YouTube back in 2011, Korean beauty creators have played an outsized role in evolving the format into what it looks like today, multi-step skincare routines, product layering demonstrations, and the kind of detailed "glass skin" routines covered elsewhere in this set.

This matters because GRWM isn't really about makeup. It's a template, a structure other creators around the world fill with their own content, whether that's getting ready for a breakup, a job interview, or just a regular Tuesday. Korean creators didn't invent the format, but they've become some of its most consistent and technically polished practitioners, which means when international creators look for a model of how to execute GRWM well, Korean content frequently sets the bar.

The Seoul Cafe Aesthetic Goes Global

If GRWM is about routine, the "Seoul cafe" aesthetic is about atmosphere, and it has become its own content category. Hashtags like #seoulcafe, #koreacafe, and #seoulcafehopping consistently surface dark, moody interiors paired with specific drink orders, black sesame lattes being one recurring favorite, photographed with a level of intentional styling that turns a coffee order into a small production.

Group of young people creating content at a stylish Seoul cafe
A Seoul cafe visit has become a content format in its own right


This isn't confined to a few famous spots either. International students who've spent time in Seoul have described entire neighborhoods, Hongdae, Gangnam, Itaewon, and lesser-known pockets of the city, as functioning like an open-air set for what's been called the "Korean Aesthetic," where cafes, malls, and even university buildings are designed with an awareness that they'll end up on someone's feed. The effect is that visiting Seoul and producing content that fits this aesthetic have become almost the same activity. You don't need to seek out a specific location. The city has been arranged, intentionally or not, so that walking into almost any well-designed cafe gives you a shot that fits the format.

Meet the Creators Setting the Pace

Behind these formats are individual creators whose accounts function as ongoing tutorials in how to do this well. Sean Solo, known online as the "Very Professional Hongdae Guy," has built a following of more than 2 million on TikTok around Korea-focused fashion, skincare, and neighborhood culture, frequently partnering with brands like Olive Young. SEBIN has built a cross-platform presence pairing aesthetic GRWM-style reels with travel and lifestyle content, while choreographer Aiki, leader of the dance crew HOOK and a recognizable face from the competition show Street Woman Fighter, has worked directly with major K-pop acts on dance challenges that ripple outward into broader social media trends.

Gen Z content creator filming inside a minimalist futuristic Seoul studio
Behind every viral Seoul video is a setup built for speed and polish


What ties these creators together isn't follower count alone. It's that their content operates as both entertainment and instruction. A viewer isn't just watching Sean Solo talk about a skincare product. They're absorbing a template for how to talk about a skincare product, how to frame a Hongdae street shot, how to pace a video so it holds attention. Multiply that across thousands of creators operating in the same dense urban environment, and you get a constant stream of format experiments that other creators worldwide can study and adapt.

Why Seoul Specifically

Part of the answer lies in something covered elsewhere in this set: the sheer density of new experiences available in Seoul at any given moment. With thousands of pop-up stores opening across the city each year and an Olive Young or beauty store seemingly around every corner, creators in Seoul have an unusually high volume of genuinely new things to film. A creator in a city with less retail and cultural churn has to work harder to find fresh material. A creator in Seoul mostly has to walk outside.

This creates a feedback loop. More new experiences mean more content. More content, especially content that performs well, attracts more creators and more brand partnerships, which funds more pop-ups and experiences, which generates more content. Seoul didn't necessarily set out to become a content production hub in this specific sense, but the conditions that make it appealing for K-beauty, K-fashion, and K-food retail also happen to make it close to ideal for short-form video.

The Economics Behind the Aesthetic

None of this happens in a vacuum from the broader creator economy, which is itself scaling rapidly. Global ad spend within the creator economy was projected to reach roughly 37 billion dollars by the end of 2025, growing at roughly four times the rate of the overall media industry. TikTok's global user base surpassed 1.7 billion monthly active users in 2025, with more than 65 percent of Gen Z using the app daily and 40 percent treating it as a search engine rather than just an entertainment platform.

For brands, this has shifted strategy toward smaller, more numerous partnerships rather than a handful of expensive campaigns, with the majority of TikTok influencer collaborations costing under 300 dollars. Seoul's creator ecosystem fits neatly into this model. A single beauty brand or cafe can work with dozens of micro-influencers across the city simultaneously, each producing slightly different versions of the same core content, multiplying reach without multiplying cost in the way traditional advertising would.

AI Enters the Feed

The next layer being added to this ecosystem is AI-generated versions of creators themselves. Some influencers are beginning to build AI "twins," digital versions capable of producing content, speaking multiple languages, or appearing in brand campaigns simultaneously without the original creator needing to film everything personally. For Seoul-based creators whose audiences already span multiple countries and languages, this kind of tool offers an obvious extension: a Korean beauty influencer's content could theoretically be localized into Spanish, Portuguese, or Hindi versions without requiring the creator to film each one separately.

It's early days for this kind of technology, and how audiences respond to AI-generated versions of creators they follow for personality and authenticity remains an open question. But given how quickly Seoul's creator ecosystem has absorbed other new formats and tools, it would be surprising if this one took long to show up in the feeds people are already scrolling through.

What This Means for Global Gen Z

Step back from any individual trend, and what's actually happening is a kind of quiet curriculum design. Someone in another part of the world watching Seoul-based content isn't just being entertained. They're absorbing a sense of what a well-executed GRWM looks like, what a cafe should feel like to be worth photographing, how a skincare routine should be paced on camera, even how a group of friends should look like they're having fun together for the algorithm. None of this is explicitly taught. It's absorbed through repetition, the same way language or table manners get absorbed by watching people around you.

That's arguably a more durable form of influence than any single viral moment could ever be. A trend can fade in weeks. A template, once internalized, keeps shaping how someone creates long after they've forgotten where they first saw it. Whether Seoul keeps generating new templates at the same pace, or whether some other city eventually takes over that role, is the question worth watching as this decade plays out.

References

AOL News and Yahoo, GRWM Trend History and Engagement Data, 2025.

KOLSprite, TikTok Influencer Marketing Trends Report, January 2026.

Favikon, Top TikTokers in South Korea 2026 Rankings.

AJ Marketing, Best Korean Instagram Influencers 2026.

Modash, South Korea Skincare Influencer Content Analysis, 2026.


Thank you for exploring the Real Korea with FRANVIA.
Discover the vibrant lifestyle, authentic culture, and the real stories of Korea.

Explore more Insights into Korean Lifestyle:

From K-Media and Food to practical Korean used in daily life and K-Dramas.
© FRANVIA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Tags
FRANVIA

Posted by FRANVIA

Post a Comment

0 Comments

Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts.
We appreciate every conversation that grows around everyday life in Korea.