Male Accessories....

I've been talking about buying a DSLR for a while now... like almost 4 months and I still haven't gotten one. That's not what this blog post is about, but that's where it starts. I was walking down the street in Kongdae (not Hongdae) with my Korean conversation partner. A young man passed by, and I stopped and stared. Not at him, but at the camera he had slung over his shoulder. He had a nice camera, just the sort of thing I've been dying to have. I turned to my conversation partner and said that I was jealous, that I wanted one like that. She laughed and said "Oh, I bet he doesn't even know how to use it. It's just an accessory...". What??? That's a pretty expensive accessory... Maybe they could just give it to me instead....

But men in Korea tend to have some interesting accessories in the eyes of a westerner. There is the ubiquitous "man bag" as we like to call it, though some are really more like "man purses". Leather bags are quite common, and these are fairly masculine, but sometimes you can see some really... pretty... bags. Then there is the mirror. I was told that all guys carry around a little mirror, just like some women do. I never saw this for myself until I went out for drinks with a male Korean friend of mine. We wanted to take some photos, but first he had to whip out his mirror out of his backpack! My American friend and I almost died laughing, but I'm not sure if he figured out what was so funny.

Men here are just as concerned with fashion as women are. It's definitely a cultural difference. Male fashion at home is so casual. Men don't like to let on that they care about their appearance... or maybe it's just that American guys obsess about different things... like their sneaker brands or something. Here, men dress like they are straight out of a fashion magazine. I hear it's 10 times more intense in Japan, but I haven't been there myself to know for certain. It's kind of nice to see well dressed men though. When they don't look like women that is.