When Faces Become Fashion

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A New Generation

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When you look at newly minted Kpop groups today, you know they’ve already undergone major reconstruction before their debut. Young boy and girl groups are all the rage in the industry and Korea’s prowess in plastic surgery allows each one to be so uniquely different in appearance. In a fairly small country covering a small territory and not containing an enormous amount of physiological diversity, these reconstructions are key to domestic branding and differentiation.

But what about the older generation of entertainment groups, ones made popular in the early 2000s or earlier, far before the trends of surgery? Well, this proves an interesting situation to examine and today, I’ll be talking about one of the earliest and still to this day, most well known groups - Girl’s Generation.

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Girl’s Generation (소녀시대) debuted in Korea in 2007 and set the very high bar for all future global pop groups. Their timing was almost synchronous with Big Bang and was often referred as the female versions of them, speaking to their equally large presence worldwide. For the first time, many members of this group were well versed in English and that, alongside the rise of YouTube and Korean economy in general, led to first instances of a superstar entity.

But Korean society has changed tremendously during the last decade, one of the main metamorphoses being the growing ubiquity of plastic surgery. What was more or less a controversial topic in the early 2000s has become a given, especially for anyone even conceptualizing a career in the entertainment world.
But that transition between then and now is long, especially in Korea’s rapid cultural pace, and for Girl’s Generation to stay relevant at least aesthetically, they’ve had to undergo major transformations through the years. What is in vogue now regarding the shape of one’s ears, chine, nose, eyes, brow, etc. is very different than the trends of 2007.

Here’s a side by side comparison from then and nowish -

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It’s tough to get an accurate look at the differences from photos like these (particularly if you don’t have an ‘asian eye’ for things) but even a quick search comparing old and new photos of specific members like Sooyung and Sunny will make it painful obvious that they’ve gone under multiple knives. These members have talked very openly about their desires to change parts of their face and body over the years.

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I’m only really using this specific group to take a bit of a cultural litmus test and broaden a particular discussion. I don’t particularly care about these groups other than that they introduce a very interesting topic. Can faces be a part of fashion? We know bodies are (sometimes our cultures prefer fit bodies or lean bodies or built bodies or au naturale), hair contributes, and of course clothing almost completely defines fashion, but a person’s face? Plastic surgery is no alien concept in American celebrity culture but in Korea, the absurdly low costs and high technologies allow severe changes in a matter of days at most. This has changed the pacing and treatment of “face fashion” that the girls of Girl’s Generation have unfortunately had to contend with.

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What do you think? Is this the way of the future? Are we going to see models and actors and performers more drastically changing their visual qualities? Let me know in the comments below!