Aged 70 she was working 20 hours a day in a hospital just to make ends meet. Now at 75, Choi Soon-hwa is an unlikely fashion star and model in South Korea, one of a handful of seniors who have become social media and fashion celebrities in a country where intergenerational conflict is mounting as the population ages.
“I think of having this job at this age as a miracle,” Choi says.
She is now the oldest professional model in the South, and has walked runway at Seoul Fashion Week. It is a far cry from her life even just a few years ago when she was a care worker, forced to take long shifts often seven days a week.
Photo: AFP
“It was hard to even get myself lunch. The stress was excruciating — it was as if a volcano was about to erupt inside me,” she confesses adding that she was in heavy debt and all her earnings were spent paying off loans. Around 45 percent of older people in South Korea live in relative poverty and the country has one of the weakest social safety nets among developed nations.
By chance Choi saw a TV commercial about senior models and saw an opportunity to make a change.
She decided to enroll in classes and was snapped by agency The Show Project and made catwalk debut soon after.
Photo: AFP
When she worked at the hospital, she says she had to dye her hair as patients didn’t want someone who “looked too old” to look after them. Now her pale locks have become an asset to a new generation of designers who value distinctiveness.
LIFE OF HARDSHIP
“I make clothes for those in their 20s and early 30s,” says Kim Hee-jin, a 32-year-old designer who hired Choi for her Seoul Fashion Week show last year, where the senior model donned a bright purple padded jacket, red-flame tights and a dress adorned with an English-language obscenity.
“There is something very unique about Choi — she has a quality that is different from anyone else (in her generation), and I thought it goes well with the kind of originality that I strive to achieve when making clothes,” she adds.
This echoes a new-found trend in Western markets, where brands now choose models who reflect the diversity in society and social media. In the past five years, catwalks globally have seen greater age diversity and models such as Jacky O’Shaughnessy, Jan de Villeneuve, and Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk, making names for themselves as fashion stars in their 60s and 70s.
South Korea’s elderly have lived through Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, severe post-war poverty and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.
“This country was very poor when I was young,” says Choi, who confesses she grew up admiring clothes worn by children at orphanages — children in such establishments in post-war South Korea were the beneficiaries of donations from the US.
Her adult life was also one of hardship. After her husband abandoned her and their two children — simply leaving home one day and never returning — she was forced to juggle working full time while being a lone parent in a nation that can be hostile to single mothers.
“During my years as a single parent of two kids I would wear the same clothes for as long as 20 years,” she adds.
DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS
Today South boasts a 43 trillion won (US$ 37 billion) fashion industry but Koreans aged 60 or older spend an average of 38,000 won (US$33) a month on clothes and shoes, while those under 40 spend three times as much.
Now in her mid seventies, Choi says her generation had been “forcing themselves to be too frugal” and says now is the time to try and live her own life.
Choi and other older celebrities have captured the imagination of South Korea’s youth and garnered large numbers of acolytes online, providing a small link between generations that are increasingly divided both politically and socially. Fellow senior model Kim Chil-doo, age 64, has some 75,000 followers on Instagram, while 72-year-old Park Mak-rye, whose posts include make-up tips, is a YouTube sensation with more than 400,000 fans.
But with the nation facing a demographic crisis, and the ratio of elderly to those of working age set to soar, tensions are mounting. Usage of derogatory terms to describe senior citizens — such as teulttakchung, meaning a “denture-wearing insect” and yeongeumchung, a “pensioner insect” — has become more common.
A study by the state-run Human Rights Commission found more than half of those aged 19-39 were worried measures to encourage job creation for the old would reduce opportunities for the young.
But for many older people, making a life change like Choi is not “even imaginable” says Michael Hurt, a sociologist at the University of Seoul.
He adds: “Opening a social media account while photographically documenting yourself all the time isn’t something they know even exists, let alone something that they would actually do.”
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
Jade Mountain (玉山) — Taiwan’s highest peak — is the ultimate goal for those attempting a through-hike of the Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道), and that’s precisely where we’re headed in this final installment of a quartet of articles covering the Greenway. Picking up the trail at the Tsou tribal villages of Dabang and Tefuye, it’s worth stocking up on provisions before setting off, since — aside from the scant offerings available on the mountain’s Dongpu Lodge (東埔山莊) and Paiyun Lodge’s (排雲山莊) meal service — there’s nowhere to get food from here on out. TEFUYE HISTORIC TRAIL The journey recommences with
RSS