JUNTAE KIM turns Seoul street grit into punk SS27 wearables

JUNTAE KIM’s SS27 “Korean Sabotage” turns Seoul’s Dongmyo street grit into boro denim, laser-slashed outerwear, heavy belts, and an ASICS GEL-Kinetic FR that reads like a punk dress shoe. The collection trades polish for abrasion, building its shape from worn indigo, battered leather, and hardware that feels salvaged rather than smoothed out.

Dongmyo, translated into clothes

The point of the lookbook is not nostalgia, but friction. Dongmyo is rendered as a place where repair, wear, and improvisation become style codes, and Kim uses that energy to push Korean fashion away from anything too packaged or pristine. The result is a collection that looks built from street residue, then sharpened into a clear product language.

That language starts with boro-printed indigo coordinates and heavily distressed denim. The boro effect gives the fabric a patched, hand-worked character, so the indigo feels lived-in rather than manufactured to look damaged. If you want the cleanest read on the collection, start there: one hard-worn denim base, then let every other element work against it.

What makes this register distinct is the refusal to romanticize damage. Kim does not flatten Dongmyo into a moodboard of grime; he uses its raw, distorted visual energy as a design system. That is why “Korean Sabotage” feels more useful than atmospheric streetwear, because the clothes carry the tension in their construction, not just in their styling.

The pieces that give the collection its shape

The strongest garments are the ones that turn weight and utility into attitude. Embossed leather jackets bring a harder, more structured surface into the mix, while transformable M-65 coats introduce military practicality without losing the collection’s punk bite. Those pieces do the heavy lifting: they hold the silhouette together even as the surface treatment stays rough and unstable.

Laser-slashed technical outerwear sharpens the collection further. The slashes cut into the clean logic of performance fabric, making the jackets feel interrupted rather than finished, which is exactly the point. In the same lane, multi-belted leather pieces add pressure and cinch, turning the waist into a graphic zone instead of a purely functional one.

If you are reading the collection as a wardrobe, the takeaway is simple: keep one element dense and structural, then let the rest stay stripped back. A transformable M-65 coat already has enough movement built in; a multi-belted leather look already carries its own punctuation. The clothes work best when they are allowed to look engineered, not decorated.

The ASICS GEL-Kinetic FR is the hinge

The ASICS collaboration is what makes the collection land as more than clothing. Introduced as part of the SS27 reveal, the GEL-Kinetic FR is framed as a hybrid “dressneaker,” a phrase that fits the shoe’s role in the lineup perfectly. It borrows Kim’s romantic and punk design language while keeping ASICS’ utilitarian backbone intact, then adds detachable hardware components that echo the collection’s modular attitude.

That matters because the sneaker does not sit outside the clothes as a merch add-on. It extends the same visual logic into footwear, where the tension between refined and rough becomes easier to track. The detachable elements give the shoe the same sense of rearrangeable armor you see in the belting, slashing, and transformable outerwear.

For styling, the GEL-Kinetic FR reads best when it is treated as part of the silhouette, not a separate statement. It can anchor cropped indigo denim, steady a long M-65, or break up the severity of an embossed leather jacket. The shoe’s value is that it makes the collection wearable beyond the runway image, translating punk energy into something that can move through daily streetwear rotation.

Why JUNTAE KIM matters now

Kim’s background helps explain why this collection feels so calibrated. He is a Seoul-based gender-fluid designer whose namesake brand was founded in 2022, and he graduated from Central Saint Martins’ MA Fashion course in 2022 before becoming a semi-finalist for the 2023 LVMH Prize. That is a fast rise, but “Korean Sabotage” shows the speed is matched by a strong point of view.

The collection also matters because it gives globally visible Korean independent design a sharper product vocabulary. Boro-printed indigo, distressed denim, slashed technical shells, multi-belted leather, and the GEL-Kinetic FR together form a set of codes that are easy to recognize without losing their edge. Kim is not asking streetwear to choose between Seoul specificity and international clarity; he is showing how the two can live in the same outfit, with Dongmyo’s roughness still visible in every seam.