“Carhartt With a Hint of Vintage Margiela”: A Strange Korean Brand’s Strange Clothing
Chaemin Lim and Gyuseok Yoon, founders of the fledgling Korean fashion label EGNARTS, find it flattering when their clothes are described as strange. The brand’s name is literally “strange” in all-caps and written backwards, after all, and how else would you describe EGNARTS’ translucent puffers stuffed with toy ducks? Or its $600 baseball cap that replaces the strap with a wristwatch? Strange is the name of the game.
But there’s method behind this madness. EGNARTS releases four collections per year, dictated not by the seasons but one abstract theme. Take the "Tainted Purity” line, for example, where yo-yos hang from a crop top and clothes are doodled with childlike illustrations. “We often find inspiration in the way adults and children dress freely, without constraints,” says the designers. The “Humanism Series,” meanwhile, is an ongoing collaboration with local businesses that range from a local Seoul laundromat hosting an EGNARTS' pop-up shop to the owners of a blacksmith workshop dressing in twisted workwear.
Jules Volleberg, co-founder of London’s APOC store and the only EGNARTS stockist outside of Asia, has seen the power of the brand’s clothing firsthand. Of the staggering 258 brands stocked by APOC, EGNARTS is always one of the top 10 sellers, the most popular items being the adjustable work pants where a fireman’s clasp or carabiner strapped around the waist changes the fit. “My boyfriend steals my pair all the time,” laughs Volleberg, who reckons it's his single most complimented item of clothing.
Founders Lim and Yoon are as enthusiastic about the design as Volleberg (and his boyfriend). “Our favorite series is the ‘Adjustable' line,” the duo says. “It’s been with us since the early days of the brand, and we feel deeply attached to it. It also represents our identity well, the idea of reversibility and transformation aligns with the core philosophy of EGNARTS.”
A video of one pair of these “adjustable” pants got EGNARTS its first slice of virality in 2023, when a video demonstrating different pocket configurations racked up millions of views on Instagram. Last year, menswear content creator Pavel Davison uploaded a video showing an updated pair of these adjustable pants where extra pocket space emerges from the fly; it currently sits at 5.5 million views.
But some of EGNARTS’ concepts are, in the founder’s words, “too abstract to be fully expressed through garments alone.” As a result, they also create art, like paintings made of food and the shadow of a stencil hitting a canvas. But, really, everything EGNARTS creates is art. “[We’re] in an era where the boundaries of what is considered ‘art’ are increasingly blurred,” says Yoon and Lim. “Like art, fashion can be interpreted in many ways. Some may see what we create simply as clothes, while others might perceive them as artworks. And we think that duality is powerful.”
Never has that duality been clearer than in “Strange Exhibition,” released at the end of 2025 alongside a corresponding art show. “Traditionally, exhibitions center on artworks, with visitors simply observing. But for this collection, we started with the idea that everyone present in the space — the curator, the guard, the janitor, the technician, the visitor — could be part of the exhibition,” says Lim and Yoon. The result? An exhibition map strapped to the front of glasses so it’s the only thing the wearer can see and hand-painted stripes turning a “cleaner’s uniform” of loose cargo pants and work vests into a creative canvas.
Lim and Yoon’s unconstrained imaginations might sometimes create “unusable” objects, like those exhibition glasses, but all this experimentation typically starts with the functional base of blue-collar workwear.
“I see it almost like Carhartt with a small hint of vintage Margiela,” says Volleberg. “Every season, they come up with completely new ideas of how garments work. Margiela really focused on concepts — let's turn garments inside out, upside down, use a doll’s proportions — and EGNARTS does the same thing.”
This ingenuity is helping spread the word beyond EGNARTS’ base in Seoul, and the 4-year-old label plans to capitalize on that. At this year’s Pitti Uomo, the famous menswear trade show, EGNARTS presented its first collection in Europe. Titled “SEEN, UNSEEN,” the intent was to bring the inner workings of clothing to the outside — another classic Margiela-ism — producing misshapen hoodies with a removable front zip and adjustable legwear where pleats form through buttons that extend the pants’ waist.
This is the early stage of EGNARTS taking its weirdness worldwide.
“We’re laying the groundwork to take EGNARTS onto a more global stage,” says Lim and Yoon. “We want to ensure that the philosophy and emotion behind our brand can resonate beyond Korea. The next chapter of EGNARTS will be about expansion, with depth and intention.”
