The Apron Girls

I live in an area chock full of art schools, universities, and did I mention art schools?

A funny thing about Korea is that they like to stick all similar businesses next to each other. Go to any area with restaurants and you will frequently see all the galbi restaurants in a row and then all the pork restaurants in a row, then all the seafood restaurants clumped together.

The same holds true for the art schools of Hongdae. There are other places suitable for art schools, I'm sure. But the majority of them are along a single road in Hongdae, home of Hongik University.

The students in the Hongdae area are similar in one way: they are all striving to be different. But they want to be different in the same way. As art students they have an idea of what they should look like and then they all go for that look. That affords them some comfort in that they ARE different from non-art school students, but they are the same as the rest of the art school students. No one will stick out like a sore thumb and will not have to suffer for being too different.

So in the art school section the way they differentiate themselves is by wearing full length aprons everywhere they go. Six days a week you can see them walking down the street in their aprons. Who knows if they even have art class that day? It doesn't really matter.

Girls (and they are mostly girls) wearing blue aprons won't walk down the street with the girls in the green aprons. They clump together or walk alone. But they never cross the line. Even talking to an other-apron girl is unheard of.

When I first moved here and saw this I thought it had to do with all the restaurants in the area. But I realized that there aren't THAT many restaurants. And finally my girlfriend Cal pointed out the paint splatters on some of the aprons. A lot of this paint appeared to be strategically placed on the apron in a very artistic way.

What bothered me when I realized this was a status symbol was that it seemed ridiculous to walk down the street in an apron, when you could just roll it up and put it on when you get to class. I expressed this opinion (in a very negative and accusatory way) to Cal. She told me to calm down and not let this be seen as a pretentious "look at me, look at me" statement I was making it out to be.

But what else can it be? First of all, art school is usually attended by pretentious idiots anyway. And second of all, in Korea the need to conform overrides all other rational thinking.

"No," Cal protested. "It's just like letter jackets jocks wear in high school in the U.S."

"No," I argued. "Letter jackets serve a purpose. They keep the wearer warm for one thing."

"But they are really just worn to differentiate the wearer from everyone else."

After a while of pondering this and the fact that most of these girls are really only 18-21 years old (the emotional equivalent of 14-16 year old girls in America), I began to accept the fact that it really was harmless and probably no more pretentious than a letter jacket.

Maybe my problem is that I never had a letter jacket or an art school apron. Or maybe it's because I never gave two shits about conforming.

Just like everyone else.