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    South Korean Women 'Escape The Corset' And Reject Their Country's Beauty Ideals

    Amid intense social pressure to conform, a photographer in Seoul aims "to destroy the socially defined idea of a woman." Women in her photos wear short hair and no makeup.
    by Anthony Kuhn May 06, 2019 4 minutes
    A South Korean woman has her head shaved in a photograph taken by Jeon Bora. Having short hair and no makeup is a common symbol of the "escape the corset" movement, which aims to reject South Korea's standards of beauty and social pressure to conform. Bora's photographs document the women involved in this movement in stark black-and-white images.

    At a gallery in Seoul's fashionable Gangnam district, the walls are lined with stark black-and-white photographic portraits of young women. Some smile, some stare at the camera impassively. Some are naked. All have short hair and no makeup.

    It's the third such exhibition by South Korean photographer Jeon Bora, who seeks to document women who reject the country's standards of beauty and the social pressure to conform.

    The women liken this pressure to a corset and have dubbed their movement, which began last year, "escape the corset."

    Jeon, 25, describes using her camera lens to show her subjects as they really are, and not how South Korean society wants them

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