Traditional Korean clothing has one of the longest continuous design stories anywhere in the world. The hanbok you see at a Seoul palace today, a short wrapped jacket over a high, full skirt, is recognisably the same idea painters brushed onto tomb walls more than fifteen hundred years ago. Korean dress took in outside influence, but never lost its own bones: a top that wraps and ties, and a bottom that is either a skirt or a pair of trousers.
The Earliest Pictures We Have
The oldest visual evidence comes from the painted tombs of Goguryeo, one of Korea’s Three Kingdoms. UNESCO inscribed the Complex of Koguryo Tombs in 2004: 63 tombs, 16 with wall paintings recording costume, food and domestic life.
The painters show a two piece outfit. Men hunt in a hip length jacket, belted at the waist, over narrow trousers. Women wear the same jacket over a skirt, often over trousers as well. Both sexes belted with a sash rather than the ribbon ties that came later. The jacket front crossed over and was held shut, and by the sixth century that crossing had settled into a consistent direction, where it has stayed ever since.
Two Garments That Never Went Away
Three words open up the whole story. The jeogori is the jacket. The chima is the skirt. The baji are the trousers. Women wore jeogori and chima, men wore jeogori and baji, and over either went a po, a robe or coat, which by the late nineteenth century usually meant the durumagi.
For a sewist the jeogori is the interesting one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes a jeogori in its collection as an open garment with a left over right closure fastened by a single bow tie. No buttons, no buttonholes. The large front and back panels are the gil. A band called the git trims the neckline, and over it sits the dongjeong, a narrow white collar strip, removable so it can be unpicked, washed and put back without laundering the jacket. The ties are the goreum.
Think about what those ties do that a button placket could not. A wrap and tie closure has no fixed size. It accommodates a growing girl, a pregnancy, a winter underlayer, a change of shape over twenty years. It spreads stress along a seam instead of loading one small point of fabric, so a fine silk jacket survives decades of wear. The chima follows the same logic: a wrap skirt with a broad waistband and long straps, tied rather than fastened, so one skirt fits many bodies.
Tang Robes, Then A Mongol Century
Under Unified Silla, from 668 to 935, Korean court dress took on Tang Chinese forms, most visibly the dallyeong, a round collared official robe. That was borrowing at the top of society, not a replacement of everyday dress; in 834 King Heungdeok restricted how far people could go in adopting Tang fashion.
The Goryeo dynasty, 918 to 1392, brought a different pressure. After Goryeo made peace with the Mongol Yuan, Yuan princesses married into the Korean royal house and brought their court style. The changes sound small and were enormous: the chima grew shorter, the jeogori rose above the waistline, and the waist sash gave way to the long goreum ribbons we now think of as the signature of the hanbok. Influence ran both ways, and Goryeo dress became fashionable among the Yuan elite in turn.
Joseon, When The Jacket Shrank
The Joseon dynasty, 1392 to 1910, gave us the silhouette most people picture. Neo Confucian government regulated dress by rank and occasion, and presided over several centuries of slow, extraordinary change in proportion.
In the fifteenth century women wore a fully pleated chima with a longish jacket. Then the jacket began to climb. Surviving garments trace the shortening: roughly 55 centimetres in the seventeenth century, about 45 in the eighteenth, around 28 by the nineteenth. The Victoria and Albert Museum, writing on hanbok as traditional Korean dress, records women’s jeogori dropping from about 60 centimetres to only 20 by the early twentieth century. As the jacket shrank, the skirt’s waistband climbed to meet it and finally sat above the bust, with a chest band, the heoritti, worn underneath for modesty. Volume moved to the hips, then out to the hem, held there by five to seven layers of underskirts.
Shin Yun-bok’s eighteenth century painting below shows it all: a jacket so short it barely covers the shoulder blades, a skirt that begins under the arms and swells outward, all of it carried on ties.
Colour, Rank And The Question Of White
Colour in Joseon Korea was not decoration, it was information. Vivid colours belonged to the upper classes and the court, where particular shades marked particular positions. Dragon roundels were restricted to the king and his heir, with five claws and four respectively, and phoenixes to the queen. A married woman’s navy chima signalled that she had a son.
Ordinary people were another matter. Commoners were restricted by law to white for everyday wear. But white was never only a restriction. Koreans had preferred it for a very long time, reading it as purity and light; the Victoria and Albert Museum describes it as standing for purity and resilience alike. Repeated attempts to push people into dyed cloth, including under Japanese rule, failed. Wearing white became a choice, and then a statement.
Pushed Aside, Then Picked Back Up
The nineteenth century closed with a rush of dress reform. An 1884 edict simplified outer robes for everyone regardless of class, age or gender, and an 1895 decree permitted short hair and Western clothing. The word hanbok itself only came into use then, coined because Koreans now needed a way to distinguish their clothing from Japanese and Western dress.
From 1900 government officials were required to wear Western dress, and through the Japanese colonial period, 1910 to 1945, the hanbok slid out of daily life and into ceremony. By the second half of the twentieth century most Koreans wore Western clothes daily and kept hanbok for weddings, Lunar New Year, ancestral rites and a baby’s first birthday.
Traditional Korean Clothing Today
The last thirty years have been kinder. Hanbok Day was established in 1996, and in 2021 the word hanbok entered the Oxford English Dictionary. In July 2022 the Korean government designated hanbok saenghwal, the whole practice of making, wearing and enjoying hanbok, as the country’s 154th National Intangible Cultural Heritage. Four Seoul palaces admit visitors wearing hanbok free of charge, and the rental shops outside their gates are busy every weekend.
Alongside that sits a lively everyday and fusion hanbok scene: a shortened chima with an ordinary shirt, a jeogori cut as a light jacket, washable fabrics meant for real weeks. The British Museum holds an unlined indigo dyed ramie jeogori and chima and notes that ramie, or mosi, is widely favoured for summer, often naturally dyed. This is a living wardrobe, not a costume, and Korean makers are the ones driving it.
Conclusion: What A Sewist Can Take Home
You do not need to sew a hanbok to learn from it, and unless you are working with a Korean maker I would not try. What travels is the closure. A garment that wraps and ties fits a range of bodies, forgives a change in size, needs no hardware, and carries its stress along a seam rather than at one point. That is a large part of why the shape outlasted fifteen centuries while the details kept moving.
To feel that under your own hands, the easiest way in is a wrap skirt. Our Easy Adjustable Wrap Skirt Pattern runs on the same principle: panels, a long waistband, ties, no zip anywhere. To read further, a search for books on hanbok and Korean dress history turns up museum catalogues and scholarly surveys.
More Folk Dress History
And if the wrap and tie idea has caught you, take it further with The Easy Wrap Dress Pattern.
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