The streets of Seoul in the winter are filled with puffer jackets from the usual brands, like The North Face and Nike, but also a more unexpected name — National Geographic.
Over the past decade-plus, the American magazine has been a prominent fashion player in South Korea, along with a number of other US companies with seemingly no relation to apparel. Over 600 brands purveying mostly outerwear and streetwear — all using international, often American, companies’ trademarks — are licensed to Korean manufacturers.
And in recent years, the most prominent brands, including National Geographic and Discovery Channel, have become ubiquitous, with hundreds of brick-and-mortar locations, including at major department stores like Shinsegae and Lotte, and are expanding across Asia.
The licensing apparel manufacturers often bank on largely favourable attitudes in Korea towards the US, and the relative ease with which they can weave much of the pre-existing aesthetic of their respective companies into their designs. Kodak employs retro colour palettes and vintage-inspired typeface; Yale incorporates preppy silhouettes and a warm colour scheme that evokes academia; MLB uses textiles embossed in a crosshatch pattern with individual teams’ logos, akin to Louis Vuitton’s signature monogrammed canvas. Leading defense contractor Lockheed Martin licensed a gorpcore fashion brand that sells military-inspired outerwear and cargo pants. Generally, the garments appeal to young Korean adults’ style sensibilities, which tend to skew towards simple and modest silhouettes in muted colours.
Historically, the main challenge for these brands has lied in consistently producing new releases that feel fresh and exciting, rather than overly commercial, particularly as younger consumers increasingly want brand identities to stretch beyond the imagery covered under original licensing agreements.
This fatigue — compounded by a pervasive sense of market saturation — has already dented sales. F&F Co., Ltd, which operates the Discovery Channel’s licence, saw year-on-year revenue fall by 4.2 percent in fiscal 2024 to roughly 1.9 trillion won ($1.3 billion) on sluggish domestic consumption. The Nature Holdings, which licenses from National Geographic and Jeep, saw revenue drop 5.8 percent in the same year to roughly 517 billion won. Lack of interest in — or even awareness of — American football has also hurt the company’s five-year-old NFL brand, whose sales nearly halved in fiscal 2024.
Geopolitical tensions bring further risk. The US’s reputation in Korea has taken a hit, with Pew Research Center data revealing a 16 percent decrease in favourable sentiment and a 20 percent rise in unfavourable sentiment towards the US among the country’s citizens between 2024 and 2025, a shift likely exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s trade policies. Beyond a 15 percent duty on South Korean imports, a $350 billion South Korean investment pledge to the US signed last month in return for a reduction in tariffs remains unpopular, and a Sept. 4 ICE raid of a US-based Hyundai factory that led to the arrest of over 300 Korean citizens — the largest-ever single-site immigration raid by the Department of Homeland Security — led the South Korean foreign ministry to open an investigation into allegations of human rights abuses.
“Many in Korea were surprised because our workers who went to the United States to help the US with its manufacturing renaissance received irrational treatment. This has also caused severe trauma for the workers as well,” South Korean President Lee Jae-myung told Bloomberg in October.
To regain their traction and assume better positioning to weather state tensions, Korean apparel lines licensed by international companies need to forge individual identities by producing unique, forward-thinking designs — though many Korean consumers seem increasingly inclined to give their dollar to brands that embody a story with personal resonance.
Shifting Cultural Attitudes
Since the mid-20th century, many South Koreans have viewed the US as culturally aspirational, owing to the countries’ close, post-Korean War political alliance and the international popularity of American media.
“In many ways, American products became part of Korean culture, [though] oftentimes [Koreans] may not be conscious of the origins,” said Gi-Wook Shin, William J. Perry professor of Contemporary Korea and founding director of the Korean Studies Program at Stanford University.
But as hallyu — Korea’s own cultural wave — continues to expand its global reach, many younger Koreans have ceased buying into the myth of American exceptionalism, and are instead learning to embrace their own heritage.
For this reason, co-opting an established company’s IP for an apparel brand has proven to be a double-edged sword in the region. Park So-ry, Korea project manager for the China-focused market research firm Daxue Consulting, believes these brands’ main strength is the respective licensor companies’ vast arsenal of graphic designs, emblems and visual storytelling at their disposal; however, their most glaring weakness then lies in the difficulties of infusing their offerings with an authentic and unique culture separate from the source material, with many Korean consumers having criticised such brands as too insincere and lacking in genuine heritage.
“While the licensor brands may have a long history, the Korean licensee brands don’t,” Park said in an email. “Some consumers say that if you remove the logo, then they’re just like other brands.”
How Brands Are Responding to Changes in Perception
To safeguard against changing attitudes, some brands are exploring ways to shift their images away from American appeal.
Lockheed Martin’s licensor Doojin Yanghang Corp. is distancing itself from its reputation as a weapons manufacturer, opting instead to lean into the concept of aerospace innovation.
“Moving forward, we plan to place less emphasis on the brand’s ‘American’ identity,” Lockheed Martin Apparel representative Yang Ji-ho wrote in an email to The Business of Fashion. “This will allow us to build an independent brand value that is resilient to shifts in the political and social climate.”
And as business in Korea contracts, manufacturers are branching out to other countries to pick up the slack. F&F Co., Ltd is relying on AI-driven trend forecasting and supply chain optimisation, and overseas growth — including an upcoming MLB expansion to the Middle East — to turn its slump around. In fiscal 2024, the company’s overseas sales rose 5 percent YoY, a steep decline from the 43 percent YoY international sales growth it saw in fiscal 2023 — but its domestic sales shrank over the same period.
“Things that are popular in the US seem to eventually trickle down and come find [their] way in Korea, and things that are popular in Korea end up finding [their] way in other parts of Asia,” said Andy Koh, a Korean American content creator based in Seoul.
Though Shin and Koh are sceptical that Korean consumers will begin consciously rejecting or even boycotting products associated with American identity, the country’s love affair with the US appears to be subsiding. Today, a recognisable foreign name alone is not enough to prove a brand’s value proposition to Korean consumers.
Those that have seen success in changing strategy include direct-to-consumer brand Brooklyn Museum, which has been lauded for taking wider creative liberties with its designs. The brand has screenprinted images of paintings currently on display at the museum in New York on its frequently sold-out sweatshirts and hoodies, or embroidered them as patches on sweaters, and has employed the museum’s pre-rebrand sans serif typeface. The team aims to foster a unique identity “exclusive to BkM Seoul,” according to the brand’s website.
Strong design will continue to be the key to these brands’ success — even amid an uncertain political climate. Take Lockheed Martin Apparel: The brand’s performance seems to show it’s largely immune in its domestic market to the online backlash it’s garnered, thanks in part to its “well-designed readapting [of] American military history and aesthetics,” said Koh. The label’s signature outerwear pieces typically sell out rapidly after release, the brand’s repeat customer purchase rate is growing and pop-ups in key retail locations like the Hyundai Seoul department store consistently surpass distributor Doojin Yanghang’s sales targets.
“An arms manufacturing company is inherently political, but I’ve never heard or found that sentiment amongst other Korean people,” said Koh, a vocal critic of the brand. “As long as it looks cool and as long as the actual product itself functions the way that they expect it to, they seem okay with it.”
