Jiyong Kim Is Sun-Bleaching His Way to Success

In a secret location just outside Seoul, a metal fence stretches across a sprawling field, where hundreds of shirts, pants, hoodies, bags, and dresses are laid out like sunbathing vacationers. Over the course of a couple of months, the sustained force of the South Korean sunlight will cause each garment to fade, creating idiosyncratic sun-bleached patterns that designer Jiyong Kim has made his signature.

“We see the transformations created by time itself as part of the design,” says Kim, who is 35 and based in Seoul. After founding the JiyongKim brand in 2021, while studying at London’s Central Saint Martins (sometimes remotely, due to Covid), Kim’s clothes are now stocked in 18 stores globally. And this season, they will be shown at men’s trade show Pitti Uomo in Florence, where the designer will take up one of three guest slots, marking his first time presenting a collection abroad.

“We’ve been closely following Jiyong Kim’s work for some time now. He’s one of the most radical designers on the Korean fashion scene today,” says Francesca Tacconi, special events manager at trade show organizer Pitti Immagine. She views the slow nature of his process using the sun as a necessary statement against hyperconsumption in fashion, with Kim’s chemical-free process as a way to outsource fabric development to one of the planet’s most abundant resources: the weather. “We urgently need new narratives to interpret what’s around us, and this incredible approach by [Jiyong] represents a paradigm shift.”

Kim, who grew up in the suburbs of Ulsan, a large industrial city around 300 kilometers south of Seoul, represents a new wave of Korean designers with a global mindset. Before attending Central Saint Martins, he left South Korea to study at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, and gained experience working under the late Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, as well as at Lemaire, learning the power of macro brand-building from the former and a granular attention to detail from the latter.

With natural dyes and craftsmanship trending in menswear, and consumers increasingly hungry for products that feel unique, JiyongKim’s inherently slow, nature-dependent, and chemical-free process has resonated since the beginning. GR8, the influential Harajuku store, ordered the entirety of his BA graduate collection, after special project manager Yoshi Takahashi was introduced to Kim’s private Instagram account by a Korean friend, where the designer was documenting his process. “At that moment, I was honestly shocked. I immediately felt there was something different about his brand,” says Takahashi. The buyer quickly DM’ed Kim, asking to order the collection. “The way the patterns are constructed feels incredibly precise and intentional, with a real sense of beauty behind every detail. Compared to most brands, the amount of time invested into each piece is extraordinary.”

Jiyong Kim has made sun-bleached patterns his signature.

The chance Takahashi took on the label was transformative. “It was my starting point for the brand,” says Kim. The relationship has continued, with GR8 now devoting a large rack to the sun-bleached garments, which Kim says “almost sell out every season” at the store; Takahashi says the customer response is “extremely positive”. This sentiment extends beyond the Harajuku store, too. JiyongKim, which currently employs 10 people across the business, was shortlisted for the LVMH Prize in 2024, and in 2025, revenues doubled from the year prior. They’re on track to double again by the end of 2026, with a “near-term goal” to reach $5 million in annual revenue.

Kim credits much of this success to a delicate wholesale strategy. The brand sells exclusively to one store in South Korea — 10 Corso Como Seoul — and does most of its wholesale business in Japan, but frequently declines stockist requests. “We say no a lot, [and have done] from the very beginning,” says Kim. How can a store make the cut? “The staff and the people who can speak about the brand are really important to us. If people don’t know about our brand, they usually think it’s just printed and wonder why it’s so expensive, but if a store has staff who can explain [the process], it’s very easy to change their mind about the value of the pieces.” A T-shirt from the brand costs $160 at retail, while a jacket can reach over $1,500, making that touchpoint with the customer crucial.

Last April, the brand opened its first flagship store in Seoul, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) has been a significant business driver since. Between the one store and e-commerce site, the channel now generates roughly twofold the revenue of the wholesale business. Located in Seoul’s fashionable Hannam-Dong neighborhood, the flagship is tucked away from the main street, giving it an ‘if you know, you know’ appeal. “Strangers cannot come to our store, because you have to search to find it,” says Jaechang Shin, the brand’s operations manager. “[The customer journey] is a new and totally different experience than what they get with the wholesale retailers.”

Alongside this growth has come a need for more space, but a significant challenge for the brand is that sun-bleaching is inherently difficult to scale. Kim rents the private field he uses to sun-bleach the garments, and recently had to move to a larger space in order to meet demand. “We can scale it if we schedule [the sun-bleaching] well,” he says. Even so, the brand is conscious of creating scarcity around the sun-bleached pieces, and the designer says he doesn’t plan to significantly increase their output. “We need to keep our uniqueness.”

Currently, JiyongKim produces around 150 of each shirt style, with some jackets kept below 100 each season. “We want to keep the uniqueness of sun-bleached pieces, because every piece is slightly different,” he says. Instead, the scaling strategy is mostly playing out through a duo of long-term collaborations. The first is an update of Puma’s V-S1 silhouette in the form of sun-bleached sneakers that are regular sellouts; another, is outerwear with South Korean mountaineering brand Kolon Sport. JiyongKim has also released a series in which T-shirts are vacuum-packed before sun-bleaching — a technique that Kim conceived — and then sold directly in their packaging. As for its womenswear, the business currently makes up a smaller portion of the brand, although Kim adds that many women also buy the men’s pieces.

Puma and JiyongKim collaboration pop up.

Ahead of this week’s Pitti Uomo presentation, Kim is excited to see how a wider menswear audience will receive his work. “We’ve been dreaming about this a lot since the very beginning. It’s an opportunity for us to present our collection in a new way outside Seoul,” says Kim, adding that he hopes it will serve as a gateway into Europe. Perhaps, in the future, we’ll see a capsule collection faded by the Florentine sunshine.