Cultural Discourses on Korean New Men"s Appearance Style - Do They Really Want a Feminine Society?

Cultural Discourses on Korean New Men"s Appearance Style

&nbsp;&nbsp;Generations of young men, so called "new men", are concentrating on their appearance style and well being, thus creating a new segment of the fashion industry. Clothing and styling the body are a basic part of constructing identities in everyday life(Kaiser, 1997). Clothing is "carriers" of ideological meanings or social agendas(Diana, 2000). That is, clothing and appearance style will be used to trace changes on the nature of the relationship between men and women.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper presents the social meanings of young men&quot;s feminized style in Korea. Textual analysis, one of the interpretive approaches, was applied to discover new men&quot;s fashion behavior. Interpretive approaches tend to reveal the structure of knowledge and power in historical, cultural and social context. Interpretive paradigm would be useful to explain how to dear out gender ambiguities in on-going well being trend, and to play sexual ambivalences visually with appearance, and finally to ease cultural tension.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;53 Korean male college students were asked to write about their appearance styling, importance of appearance in social success, attitude on feminized men&quot;s style. Text from the survey were interpreted. Developing a holistic understanding while noting similarities across transcripts was followed by aggregate in terms of meaning categories in the interpretation procedure.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Findings were as follows: First, generations of young men were very interested in grooming and fashion, and would shop fashion product for themselves. They would shop for fun as well as purposive shopping. New men were likely to refer internet sites for their shopping as well as grooming information search. Second, young men thought their appearance would affect their job interview and social success. Third, some of new men enjoyed Mr. beauty style while the others kept a distance from too much feminized styling. This result could be explained by differences in gender power.