Capturing the colorful streets of Seoul and Busan.
South Korea felt like a hyper-capitalistic wonderland. Trendy coffee shops with some of the coolest interior designs you’ll ever see, sleek flagship stores, hundreds of skincare shops with infinite aisles of products, beauty clinics multiplying across the city, and massive, “in your face” advertisement billboards. The equation is simple: products to look beautiful and stylish, paired with Instagrammable spaces to capture your purchased identity.
Trends were impossible to miss. I lost count of how many women wore the same uniform: pleated mini skirts paired with black knee-high boots. It felt a bit ironic, considering that just a few kilometers to the north, residents of South Korea’s communist sister might be wearing a different kind of uniform—one dictated by necessity rather than fashion.
Despite this consumerism, I found beauty in simpler moments: riding local buses through quiet hillside neighborhoods, watching sunsets paint the sky above 7-Eleven stores, with schoolkids playing out front.
Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen
alexandravanderessen.com 
Leave a comment