South Korea’s representative female apparel line, KUHO, continues to expand its global business this year.
The Samsung C&T Fashion Group brand showcased its Spring/Summer 2020 collection on September 5 in Lower Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Three days later, on September 8, KUHO also announced the opening of its first global popup store.
The SoHo presentation attracted over 200 attendees, including key international department store buyers, fashion journalists from publications such as Vogue and ELLE, and local influencers like Maria Alia, Gia Seo, and actress Jung Eun-Chae, who is KUHO’s brand muse.
KUHO has set its concept for S/S 2020 to be “crossover.” Crossing over utility elements and feminine sensibilities, KUHO is demonstrating its own new style.
The brand creates a feminine casual look by sublimating functional details such as patch pockets, belts, and strings into its designs, and applying feminine colors and silhouettes. Tangerine, lavender, brown and other hues create balance to express the spring mood. KUHO also emphasizes rich silhouettes with strong, rustling material and natural crinkles.
In particular, KUHO uses stripe design motifs for S/S 2020. Its characteristic items such as dresses, coats, shirts and knits come in stripe patterns of various colors, thicknesses and spaces. KUHO has additionally developed its own unique multi-stripe pattern that combines tangerine, lavender and brown.
Vogue Paris Market Director Michael Gleeson, who attended this presentation, said, “It was a collection of femininity and practicality, and is set to be positioned as a contemporary brand that many women throughout the global market can fall in love with.”
KUHO is running a sales showroom until Sept. 14 and will continue by welcoming buyers from department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman (USA), Harvey Nichols (UK) and Holt Renfrew (Canada), as well as online malls including Net-a-Porter (UK).
In the meantime, KUHO offers customers an opportunity to experience the brand directly by visiting its downtown New York pop-up location until Sept. 22. Inspired by the Vertical Forest concept, the store consists of a basement and first floor totaling 298 m2. This urban healing space features sculptures with towers holding the air-purifying plant tillandsia.
The pop-up shop’s basement is set up as a sales showroom, while the 2019 Fall products are on public sale on the first floor. KUHO offers private styling services to its local customers by suggesting over 170 products including coats, pants, knitwear and other accessories to match the autumn weather in New York.
“This year, in order to expand our global business, we opened the first pop-up shop to introduce KUHO not only to major retail buyers in North America, Europe and Asia, but also to New Yorkers,” said Yoon Jeong-hee, managing director of Samsung C&T Fashion Group’s female apparel business department. “We plan to reinforce differentiated branding based on our clear identity so that KUHO can be firmly positioned as a global brand.”
