From the World Cup Stage to My Daughter's First Birthday: Hanbok Is Still Alive

A Korean Dress on the World's Biggest Stage

I was watching the 2026 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony in Mexico City when I saw it. South Korean-American singer EJAE walked onto the stage at Estadio Azteca — one of the most iconic football venues on the planet — wearing a floor-length cobalt-blue gown that stopped me mid-reach for my chimaek (치맥). The dress, created by Korean brand LEJE, wasn't just a fashion choice. It was a statement. The sculptural silhouette, the layered fabric folded to catch the light like water, the white floral appliqués hand-embroidered by Korean artisans — all of it drawn directly from the lines of hanbok (한복), Korea's traditional clothing. And then she sang a line in Korean. On a FIFA stage. In front of the entire world.

I sent a voice note to my wife before the match even kicked off.

That moment made me think about something I hadn't consciously considered in a while: hanbok is everywhere, if you know where to look. It's on global stages. It's in my daughter's first birthday photos. It's in the memory of my grandmother pressing a crisp 10,000-won note into my hand while I bowed in a stiff jeogori (저고리) I'd already half-grown out of. Hanbok never really went away. It just evolved — quietly, stubbornly, on its own terms.

Traditional hanbok — the jeogori (저고리) top and chima (치마) skirt — has been worn in Korea for over a thousand years.

What Is Hanbok, Actually?

The word hanbok (한복) literally means "Korean clothing" — han (한) referring to Korea, bok (복) meaning clothing. Simple enough. But what it represents is anything but simple.

Hanbok has been worn on the Korean peninsula for well over a thousand years. Its foundational silhouette — a short, wrap-front jacket called the jeogori (저고리) paired with a high-waisted, full-length skirt called the chima (치마) for women, or loose trousers called baji (바지) for men — traces back to the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC – 668 AD). That's not a misprint. People were wearing a version of this silhouette before the Roman Empire fell.

Through the Goryeo Dynasty and into the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), hanbok became more refined and codified. Colour carried meaning: bright colours for children and celebrations, muted tones for everyday wear, white for mourning. The rank of a government official could be read in the colour of his robe. A bride's hanbok on her wedding day was a careful negotiation of family, status, and regional tradition.

Then came Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), which suppressed Korean cultural expression in ways that left deep scars. After liberation and the Korean War, rapid modernisation in the 1960s and 70s pushed Western clothing into everyday life almost overnight. Suits. Jeans. Blouses. Hanbok retreated — not into extinction, but into ceremony.

How Hanbok Became a Global Conversation

Here's the thing about Korean culture: it has this remarkable ability to absorb, adapt, and then quietly reintroduce itself to the world in a form nobody was expecting.

K-drama costume departments have been doing this for years — dressing actors in hanbok for historical dramas that get streamed in 190 countries on Netflix. K-pop stylists started incorporating hanbok elements into stage looks. Then brands like LEJE started appearing — Korean designers who didn't want to preserve hanbok behind museum glass, but wanted to ask: what does this silhouette look like in 2026?

EJAE's World Cup dress was the answer to that question made visible. Fabric stretching up to 100 yards layered in multiple folds. Mother-of-pearl and white crystal hand-carved by Korean artisans. The graceful curves and rich volume of hanbok redrawn into a modern silhouette. And underneath the full hem, unexpectedly — Adidas sneakers. That detail alone felt like a whole cultural manifesto.

When I described the dress to my wife, who was half-asleep on the sofa in our Yongin apartment, she just nodded and said: "That's what hanbok does. It stays."

When Koreans Actually Wear Hanbok Today

So when do people actually wear hanbok in Korea in 2026? More often than outsiders might expect — and in more forms than most people realise.

Seollal (설날) and Chuseok (추석)

The two major Korean holidays — Lunar New Year and the autumn harvest festival — are still the most common occasions for hanbok. Growing up, I remember the ritual clearly: being dressed in a hanbok that felt slightly too stiff and slightly too small, then performing sebae (세배), the formal New Year's bow, to grandparents and older relatives. In return, you received sebaedon (세뱃돈) — New Year's money in a small envelope. The exchange felt ancient and specific in a way that I didn't fully appreciate until I was an adult doing the same bow in jeans because my childhood hanbok had long since stopped fitting.

These days, many families — especially younger ones — opt for gaeryang hanbok (개량한복), modernised versions that keep the aesthetic but swap stiff brocade for comfortable, breathable fabrics. Looser cuts. Elastic waistbands. The kind of hanbok you can actually sit cross-legged in while eating tteokguk (떡국). It's a practical compromise that's become increasingly mainstream, and personally, I think it's exactly the right direction — keeping the cultural connection without the physical suffering.

Weddings

Korean weddings today are largely Western in format — a ceremony hall, a white dress, a suit. But hanbok hasn't disappeared from the picture entirely. At my own wedding, my wife and I wore Western dress for the main ceremony. But both our mothers wore hanbok. This is actually a very common convention in Korea: the mothers of the bride and groom wear hanbok as a marker of the occasion's formality and cultural significance.

There's even an unspoken colour code. The groom's mother typically wears blue or sky-blue tones — haneul-saek (하늘색). The bride's mother wears pink or rose tones. I'd never thought about why until I started writing this. The colours signal whose side of the family is whose, a visual grammar that wedding guests can read instantly. Nobody teaches you this explicitly. You just absorb it.

Some couples do choose to incorporate hanbok more fully — particularly in the paebaek (폐백) ceremony, a traditional post-wedding ritual where the couple formally greets the groom's family in full traditional dress. We didn't do a paebaek, but at the weddings I've attended over the years, those moments tend to be the ones that make older relatives visibly emotional.

Doljanchi (돌잔치) — The First Birthday

If there's one occasion where hanbok is essentially non-negotiable in modern Korea, it's the doljanchi (돌잔치) — a child's first birthday celebration. The dol (돌) marks the first year of life, historically significant in a time when infant mortality was high enough that reaching your first birthday was genuinely cause for communal celebration. The tradition has survived into an era of excellent neonatal care largely because Koreans are very good at keeping meaningful celebrations alive.

For my daughter's doljanchi, we dressed her in both — a Western-style dress for part of the photographs, and a full hanbok for the rest. My wife and I didn't wear hanbok ourselves, but watching our daughter in that tiny jeogori and chima, the colours bright against the backdrop of the doljabi (돌잡이) spread — the ritual where the child picks an object that supposedly predicts their future — I understood something about hanbok that I hadn't quite been able to articulate before.

It's not nostalgia. It's continuity.

The doljanchi (돌잔치) — a child's first birthday — is one of the most common occasions for hanbok in modern Korea.

Hanbok Abroad: Growing Up Korean in Nottingham

When my family emigrated to the UK when I was in primary school, we brought a hanbok with us. It lived folded in a bag at the back of a wardrobe, brought out for Korean church festivals or school cultural events where someone needed to represent Korea. I wore it to a few of those events as a child — always slightly too warm, always drawing questions from classmates who wanted to touch the fabric.

The problem was that children grow. By secondary school, the hanbok I'd brought from Korea no longer fit. There was no replacement. In Nottingham in the 1990s, you couldn't exactly pop to the shops for a new one. So that chapter closed on its own, quietly, the way a lot of childhood things do.

What I didn't realise then was how much that small exposure had lodged itself somewhere permanent. When EJAE walked onto that FIFA stage in a cobalt-blue dress that carried a thousand years of Korean textile history in its folds, I didn't need anyone to explain it to me. I felt it before I could name it.

More Than a Costume

There's a temptation, especially in Western contexts, to frame traditional clothing as costume — something worn for performance, for tourism, for themed photographs at Gyeongbokgung Palace (경복궁). And hanbok has certainly become part of that tourism economy; rental shops near the palace gates do brisk business with visitors who want the experience.

But that reading misses something important. Hanbok is also the dress a grandmother pulls from a chest to wear to her grandchild's first birthday. It's the colour-coded language mothers speak at their children's weddings. It's the gaeryang hanbok a thirty-something wears on Chuseok because it's comfortable and it connects her to something she can't fully explain but doesn't want to lose. It's a cobalt-blue gown standing in a Mexican football stadium, singing in Korean to a global audience.

Hanbok isn't a relic. It's a living thing — adapting, reappearing, refusing to be archived.

I'm going to make sure my daughter knows that. Starting with the photographs from her first birthday, where she's reaching for the doljabi objects in a tiny, perfect jeogori.

In future posts, I'll be writing about the doljanchi tradition in more detail, as well as Korean holiday customs and what a modern Korean wedding actually looks like. If any of those topics interest you, keep an eye on The Haru Box.

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📦 About The Haru Box

The Haru Box is written by David — a Korean-British writer based in Yongin, South Korea. Born in Korea, raised in Nottingham, and returned after university, David writes about the everyday details of Korean life that don't make it into the guidebooks. New posts every week or two. If something here made you think, feel free to explore more below.