SABUK, South Korea: Andre Kim's fashion show on a recent Saturday evening ended, as his shows always do, with wedding gowns and Gounod's "Ave Maria." The models then all lined up on the outdoor stage to summon Kim, who appeared on the runway, triumphantly, in his trademark all-white spacesuit.
It was another successful show for Kim, 72, still South Korea's most famous and powerful fashion designer, some four decades after he made Western dress popular among Korean women. An instantly recognizable cultural icon because of the futuristic suit he has chosen to wear for the last 30 years, a favorite of consumers and comedians alike, Kim threatened to overshadow his own collection.
The applause continued. After bowing several times, Kim stepped off the stage and shook hands with the Koreans and foreigners sitting in the front rows. But he was hardly done for the day. He and his entourage had left Seoul in the morning and arrived here in this former coal mining town, now a gambling resort with Las Vegas-style hotels, after a three-hour drive across the peninsula.
"Pardon me, pardon me, I must leave immediately," Kim, famous for working seven days a week, said in English. "I have work in Seoul early tomorrow morning."
With that, Kim began making his way through the crowd, his suit's baggy pants making a rapid swishing sound. People grabbed their camera phones, some not fast enough. Kim, like some costumed superhero, had already disappeared into the late summer evening's darkness.
Such is Kim's power that everyone from the most sought-after actresses to the wives of ambassadors posted to South Korea has modeled in his shows. In recent years, he has lent the Andre Kim brand to cosmetics, sunglasses, golf equipment and apartment interior design, as well as washing machines, refrigerators and other home appliances manufactured by Samsung.
But it is the clothes — usually baroque, in bright, bold colors, with Byzantine or Renaissance motifs — that have made Kim. They exude a Western sensibility, sometimes loudly, as with his collection of dresses featuring prints of paintings by Rubens, Ingres, Michelangelo and Raphael.
"Fashion should portray grace, intellectual and artistic beauty, youthful energy," Kim said. "Not too classic. I don't like 'old.' Even though I was born in 1935, I don't feel my age. I feel like a teenager who is 10 or 15 or 20 years old — fairy tale, fantasy, young and brilliant."
In the early 1960s, when Kim began designing, the country was still recovering from the Korean War, information from abroad was scarce and very few Korean women wore Western clothes.
Yang Sook Hi, a professor of textile and clothing design at Sookmyung Women's University, said that while female fashion designers also took up Western fashion in the early 1960s, Kim popularized it through fashion shows and the mass media.
"Andre Kim contributed in a way that greatly appealed to the general public and he was very proactive in this," Yang said. "He became known to all South Koreans."
Although Kim grew up in a farming village outside Seoul, his earliest memories revolve around clothes. During Japan's colonial rule, he remembered hearing of privileged Korean women, called "modern women," coming back from Japan dressed in the Western fashion already popular there. In kindergarten, he remembers being deeply impressed by the sight of a bride during a village wedding.
"Since an early age I was into art," he said. "I started by painting landscapes but then I started to draw Western dresses as if I were dressing women. But the reality at the time was that women were still wearing traditional Korean dresses."
Before anyone else here did, Kim also grasped the importance of creating an image — in his case, one that dovetailed with a domestic longing for the West's imagined luxury and sophistication. He started by jettisoning his first name, Bong-nam. At the suggestion of a friend in the French Embassy, he reinvented himself as "Andre," a name that sounded "poetic" to him.
He began courting foreign diplomats, a practice he has maintained to this day, and images of Andre Kim with ambassadors and their spouses became a staple of newspapers and television. He sprinkled English words, like "elegance," "romanticism," "fantasy" and "intellectual," into every other sentence. "I love the Oxford accent. It is very dignified," Kim said. "I love America very much, the citizens, the government, the politics, the culture. But I love the Oxford accent. I feel it's more intellectual."
Over time, an Andre Kim dress became part of the closet of many well- dressed women here. Kim was invited to design dresses for the Miss Universe pageant. He received cultural awards from European governments.
Details of his personal life were known by every South Korean. He read a dozen newspapers a day to keep up with trends. He never married, but adopted a son.
"I grew tremendously," Kim said, "in line with the South Korean society and economy."
Even as his dresses changed with each new collection, though, Kim settled on the white spacesuit for himself.
"I used to wear regular tailored suits until 30 years ago," Kim said. "But because I don't exercise, there came a time when I could no longer wear tailored suits in a way that satisfied the style. The suit I designed is not only futuristic, but it covers the figure I lost by not exercising." He has more than 100 identical spacesuits, changing twice or three times a day. The spacesuit became a fixture of virtually every important social event, at which he invariably occupied the best seat or table. Only the ever-thicker makeup on Kim's face, and the thinning hair he covered by painting his head boldly in black, betrayed the passage of time.
Yet as South Korea changed, so did Kim's standing. As the country democratized in the late 1980s and lifted restrictions on travel abroad, and as the country's popular culture spread throughout Asia, Andre Kim began to seem, especially to the young, a vestige of a country that had long vanished.
In the 1980s, when asked to name a fashion designer, South Koreans would answer "Andre Kim" with a self-satisfied smile, Chang Woo Chul, a fashion writer at GQ Korea, wrote in an e-mail. "But now one would laugh at oneself while giving the same answer," Chang wrote.
A few years ago, Kim was forced to reveal his real first name, Bong-nam, in a court appearance. Many howled to learn the given name of the man known as "Andre," a name that sounded old- fashioned and rural.
Kim was unfazed.
"When I watch television and see comedians mimicking me, I feel embarrassed," he said. "But when I go out and meet the public, I'm popular. People ask for my autograph. They take photos of me or together with them. I see that as the public's love for me."
