Woo Young Mi

Woo Young Mi is a Korean fashion designer, founder of Solid Homme and Wooyoungmi, and one of the central figures in the internationalisation of South Korean menswear. Born in Seoul in 1959, she studied fashion at Sungkyunkwan University and entered the industry at a moment when Korean menswear was still defined largely by conservative tailoring and domestic retail codes. In 1988 she launched Solid Homme, building a design-led menswear business that helped shift the local market towards softer, more contemporary ready-to-wear.

In 2002 Woo founded Wooyoungmi in Paris, using the French menswear calendar as a platform for a more elevated and culturally layered proposition. The label’s official Paris presence from 2003 and her 2011 admission to La Chambre Syndicale de la Mode Masculine gave Korean menswear a sustained institutional foothold in Europe. Her practice has since moved between Seoul and Paris, maintaining Solid Corporation as an independent family-led structure outside the conglomerate luxury model.

Woo’s career is also defined by continuity across generations. Her sister Woo Jang Hee was part of the early Solid Homme history, while her daughter Katie Chung became co-creative director of Wooyoungmi in 2014. Across Solid Homme and Wooyoungmi, Woo has built a dual-brand system: one contemporary and urban, the other more romantic, architectural and luxury-facing, both rooted in a disciplined understanding of menswear.

Woo Young Mi’s design ethos is architectural without being cold. She works through cut, proportion and a controlled sense of volume, using tailoring as a structure that can soften, widen and move without simply asserting masculine authority. Long coats, generous trousers, precise shoulders, dense knits and refined outerwear recur across her work, giving the body a composed silhouette with enough space for modern ease.

Her visual language often draws from art, architecture and Korean cultural memory. The reference may be Edward Hopper, Bauhaus geometry, Hwarang warriors, early railway modernity or the atmosphere of a Seoul winter, but the result is usually filtered through garment discipline: cloth, line, surface, styling and proportion carry the idea. She rarely turns references into costume.

The difference between her two principal labels shows the range of that method. Solid Homme favours pragmatic city dressing, technical casualwear and geometric clarity; Wooyoungmi heightens similar structural instincts into a more polished and sometimes romantic runway language. Across both, Woo’s strongest contribution lies in giving Korean menswear a form of international fluency without stripping it of local memory.