The Korean Wave 2006 - Korean Cultural Service

The New York Times, sunday, december 17, 2006
st12
Keeping At Least
One Slate Blank
By DAVID COLMAN
Will success spoil Doo-Ri Chung? Over the last
few years, as her fashion line, Doo.Ri, has become
that rare thing in fashion, a quiet and
reliable smash, Ms. Chung has learned that running a
good business is like looking after a child – a hungry one.
Her weekly volleyball game: a thing of the past. Ditto
cooking dinner. “We never see our apartment,” Ms.
Chung said. Her husband, Jeffrey Green, has joined her
as a business partner, so at least she gets to see him.
Ms. Chung’s fine-tuned creations resonated with enough serenity
and glamour for her to have received the 2006 CFDA/
Vogue Fashion Fund award last month, but those luxuriant
qualities are in shorter supply in her life, certainly more so
than when she was merely dreaming and planning her solo
act while working in Geoffrey Beene’s design studio.
“There’s so much about fashion that’s not about design,”
she said with a patient smile.
In her clever way, she does what she can for a little diversion.
For one, she is growing an herb garden in the south window
of her studio in the notions district off Fifth Avenue as
a nod to her erstwhile domestic life. And watching over the
enterprise is a ghostly little presence that, like Ms. Chung
herself, is caught between being and becoming.
A gift from her husband last year, it is a Munny doll, a
$25 white vinyl toddler from Kidrobot. It was designed
by the store’s owner, Paul Budnitz, in 2005 as a do-ityourself
version of the myriad cartoonish Kidrobot figures.
Munny is meant to be personalized in whatever
manner its owner chooses: Magic Marker, crayon, decal,
paint, blowtorch. But as devoted a problem-solver as Ms.
Chung is, she has not even put on her thinking cap.
“I love it all white,” she said. That is not, as one might
think, because of some Beene-ian adoration of abstraction,
purity and form, but rather because of the wealth
of possibility the little dough boy offers.
“I love its potential,” she said. “It’s so great that someone
came up with the idea of this, something that everyone
can have their different visions of.”
The doll brings to mind her brief foray running a retail
store, during which she learned two valuable lessons:
one, that a simply constructed dress changes enormously
depending on how those wearing it project themselves.
“It’s really more about personality than size,” she said.
“There’s a real alchemy to it.” (The second lesson: “I
didn’t like retail.”)
But inasmuch as the doll hints at the limitless possibilities
the future may hold, it is also a charming token of the irony-rich,
retro-mad pop-culture world that, as a hot fashion
designer, she is regularly called on to interact with, an
obligation she views with suspicion bordering on alarm.
“This really contradicts what I do,” she said of the Munny.
“It’s very whimsical, and my clothes aren’t whimsical.
They’re analytical. I don’t do retro. I don’t believe in it.”
Indeed, the Munny doll, quiet and need-free, is just
about the only figure of the modern pop landscape that
she can deal with, and she can’t even figure out a way to
dress it. So don’t ask her if there is some star she is dying
to design for; she will only draw a blank.
But she draws them so beautifully, can you blame her?
119
Copyright © 2006 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.