A model wears pleated clothes in this image provided by pleats brand Monplisse MONPLISSE What are moms in Seoul’s affluent neighborhoods wearing this summer? The answer is pleats. The late summer heat and humidity have hit Korea hard, and in this weather, getting dressed is an exercise in surrender. Comfort, coolness or looking like you made an effort — you can choose two, but not all three. What women have been finding this season, mothers of small children first among them, is pleats, which ask for no such concession. Once associated with older women, pleats are now finding a younger audience among women in their 30s and 40s who want comfort without looking underdressed. A woman wearing a pleated setup is seen in this screenshot from a reel created by an Instagram influencer, introducing pleats as a new trend among women in their 30s and 40s SCREEN CAPTURE The shopping platforms have the receipts to prove the trend. Monplisse, a pleats specialist brand, reported that first-half sales of pleated items ran 294 percent ahead of the same period last year. Searches for "pleats" on Zigzag, a shopping app that connects users with over 7,000 individual stores and brands, were up 69 percent year on year, spread across cardigans, blouses, sleeveless tops and setups rather than concentrated in any one item — a distribution suggesting the category has finally escaped the skirt, where it has been confined for decades. Queenit ran a dedicated pleats showcase from June 8 to 15 with specialist labels including Pleats Mood, Benja, Pleatsme, Pleats 31 and Monte Milano, and followed it with an encore run in July on the strength of the response. 황금성게임동영상 A Monplisse representative said the brand's core buyers are women in their 30s and 40s, and that the reviews cluster around a consistent set of reasons. "What comes up repeatedly is the fit and silhouette covering the body, the coolness and lightness, and the quality for the price," the representative said. "Customers who have worn one often come back for another color or a different silhouette, and a lot of them buy for other people — for a friend on a recommendation, for a parent, for a husband." Practicality is the word that recurs, and it recurs most continuously among women with small children, jobs and no particular interest in fashion as a project. “Sometime in my early 30s I realized T-shirts didn’t suit me anymore,” Chung Suh-young, a mother in her mid-30s with a small son who lives in the Mokdong neighborhood, said. “I tried pleats for the first time and confirmed that this was now the thing that did suit me. They look official, but the fabric is comfortable, which is what I like.” Chung owns the pleated tops in silver, brown and black, wears one to the office roughly three times a week, and treats them as a garment requiring no decisions — the point being that the same top clears two very different bars. Pleated clothes and fabric are seen in this image provided by Monplissé, a pleated wear brand MONPLISSE 손오공릴게임솔루션 "It's good that you can wear it to work, and you can also wear it out to meet friends on the weekend," she said. "It isn't so formal that it's a whole production, but it doesn't look sloppy either. That's exactly the right place." The trousers don't pass at the office, so those come out on Saturdays: "They're so comfortable, and they don't show your shape, but they don't make you look bulky either." The distinction matters more than it sounds. Her complaint about the cotton T-shirt is not only that it wets through when you sweat. “With a cotton tee the sweat comes straight through, and pleats are better on that count,” Chung said. “It clings just enough that your stomach doesn’t show, and you look smaller in it than in a T-shirt. A T-shirt is either tight enough to display your whole body or it’s just boxy.” What Chung and others are describing is a dress code with no name and no exemptions. “A working mother in her mid-to-late 30s doesn’t have the energy to dress properly every single day, but she can’t go around looking like a wreck either — weekends included,” said Lee Na-yeon, another woman in her late 30s with two daughters who lives in Yeouido. “You might end up at the playground talking to some other kid’s mother. It has to be comfortable, but not so comfortable that you look destitute.” Another young mother from an affluent area, Chung Ye-rin, who has a five-year-old daughter, works in the fashion industry and lives in Oksu-dong, named the same enemy. The Pleatsme logo is seen at a pop-up store for the brand at Hyundai Department Store's Sinchon branch in Seodaemun District, western Seoul, on July 27. 모바일 야마토릴게임 LIM JEONG-WON “Sadly, a cotton short-sleeved T-shirt in summer looks frumpy on almost everyone,” she said. “Pleats are light and cool, but the shape holds, so for how comfortable they are, you look reasonably dressed. I can’t stretch to brands like Issey Miyake, but so many affordable versions with similar designs have come out recently that the look is easy enough to approximate.” “Pleats are also being distributed everywhere because it’s trending, and once you keep seeing it, you end up buying one,” Chung Ye-rin said. “Pleats always looked like grandma clothes to me, but now the mood has shifted to women in their 30s and 40s wearing them.” Chung Suh-young dates the change to the clothes themselves and the recent change in how they are manufactured. “A few years ago, the silhouettes were more geometric — they ignored the line of the body and emphasized the shape of the garment,” she said. “Now they come out feeling like practical clothes, and the fabrics have gotten less futuristic, a bit warmer, so they read as everyday wear.” A model wears pleated clothes in this image provided by pleats brand Beneater BENEATER Kim Yoo-jin, CEO of the pleats brand Beneater, whose Apgujeong department store pop-up outperformed its projections this year, makes the same argument from the production side. “In the past there were a lot of loud patterns and roomy silhouettes, but recently we’ve been applying pleats to the items younger customers already wear every day — T-shirts, sleeveless tops, trousers, cardigans,” Kim said. 모바일신천지모바일 “The colors and designs have moved in a far more minimal, refined direction. Narrowing the gap between ‘comfortable clothes’ and ‘dressed clothes’ is one of the biggest reasons pleats are getting attention again from customers in their 30s and 40s.” The technical case for pleats is more interesting than the marketing copy suggests. Experts note that nearly all pleated clothing on the market is polyester, because polyester and nylon are thermoplastic: heat alone deforms them permanently, so a pressed pleat is a permanent pleat, and the garment resists creasing anywhere else because it has already been set. Rayon or fine cotton can be pleated, but only with a resin treatment that surrenders to washing, ironing and time. The practical consequence of this is that pleats survive being neglected. It goes into a cold wash, dries fast, comes out needing no iron, and holds its shape through all of it, provided it is kept away from a hot dryer and the high-pressure press at the dry cleaner's. For a mother getting more than two people dressed on a weekday morning, that is not a minor specification, but most of the reason the garment is in the closet. “What a wearer actually feels when wearing a piece of clothing runs across four dimensions, and pleats score on all of them: psychological, in the body-correcting effect and the formal appearance; thermophysiological, in the ventilation; ergonomic, in the freedom of movement; sensorial, in the lightness and the reduced clinging,” said Yoo Shin-jung, a professor in the Department of Clothing and Textiles at Kyung Hee University. 달팽이 레이싱 토토 “Comfort has many aspects, and worn well, this is a material that can satisfy all of them evenly,” Yoo said. “It doesn’t restrain the body at all, so activity levels are high, and it doesn’t look informal the way sportswear does — there’s a properly-dressed quality to it. For women in their 30s and 40s who are raising children, there’s more than enough reason to love it.” Pleated shirts and blouses are seen at a Pleatsme pop-up store for the brand at Hyundai Department Store's Sinchon branch in Seodaemun District, western Seoul on July 27. LIM JEONG-WON The ergonomic point of pleats has an engineered background. Stretch normally requires spandex, and spandex-blend fabrics dry slowly and wear hot; pleats deliver movement without it. Meanwhile, the folds themselves act as channels — vertical pleats ventilate better than horizontal ones, and happen also to be the ones that read as slimming — with the reduced contact area cutting the sticky adhesion of a sweating summer. “Because pleated wrinkles don’t cling to the surface of your skin, the lumps and bumps show less,” Yoo said. “It covers the body’s curves with a structure that has already been formed, so there’s an effect of being reshaped.” Pleats are here to stay; not just a fast-changing fad but something that may become a staple item in women’s closets, according to those in the industry. “We see pleats less as a trend item consumed by a particular age group in a particular season, and more as something that could settle in as an everyday material category for women who value comfort and practicality,” said Kim. BY LIM JEONG-WON [] rel="nofo