Soo Joo Park is the Epitome of Beauty and Intellect
It’s windy up here!
We’re on the roof terrace of the Frank Gehry-designed UTS building in Sydney, a genuinely thrilling new landmark of the sort that tourists in Europe travel by the coachload to visit.
Park is the Korean-born, Californian-raised model who epitomises that overused phrase: ‘Hot right now’. In March she was announced as the first Asian-American global spokesmodel for L’Oréal Paris (significant stuff – “I get to be at the frontier of globalism and diversity,” she says).
In May she opened the Chanel Cruise show in Seoul, then flew to Melbourne to shoot the new Mimco campaign. After that it was Sydney for Sunday Style, then off to Cannes to walk the red rug. Today’s dressing gown is a far cry from the sculptural Oscar de la Renta gown she wore there.
“Surprisingly, I’ve been getting really into pink,” she says, “Or not surprisingly? I used to have pink hair.” (Today it’s blonde; soon to be blue.) “I’m actually obsessed with this fabric,” she says, fingering the robe. “What is it?” Um, velour, I think.
“Ah, yes, fluffy velour. I’m all about texture right now because I get to travel so much, and there’s something pretty comforting about it, right? Imagine if the world was covered in this fabric. Maybe I could design a big upholstered building?”
That’s not as bonkers as it sounds – she knows about such things.
Park, 26, is the rare model who began as a grown-up, having lived a whole student life before she carved a career based on her good looks. “I studied architecture at Berkeley,” she explains. “It was not so much about engineering, more about design concept and theory; how you drive your process. I graduated, then I had a full-time job doing graphic design for a start-up company in the Bay Area [of San Francisco].
“I realised before I graduated that I didn’t want to pursue architecture, but I’ve always thought it was fascinating to learn about shapes, how things are built and the effects they have on the body and emotions. Buildings can give you a sense of belonging. A home is not only a place where you rest, it can also connect you to friends, family, community – from someone like Frank Lloyd Wright, who was all about the hearth at the centre of design, and that being almost like your heart, to someone more Bauhaus and modern, like Mies van der Rohe. But this is definitely more organic.” She gestures to the higgledy-piggledy walls towering above us.
Gehry designed the fanciful building, the set for our shoot, around the idea of a tree house. Nicknamed the ‘paper bag building’ (but not by him), class and common rooms sprout like branches off a central trunk and there’s not a straight wall in the place. The star Canadian architect wanted to create spaces that foster the cross-pollination of ideas, with seating and eating areas, and linking corridors and staircases that encourage interaction – he’s all about passing on the stairs; these are spaces built for human contact.
Completed in November, with the help of a $20 million donation from its namesake, Dr Chau Chak Wing (total cost: $180 million), inevitably it’s the outside of this structure that has people talking – despite those high concepts within. From a distance, the complicated curved brown-brick facade does resemble a scrunched-up paper bag. Critics have drawn comparisons with the work of Gaudí.
“I heard a story about Frank Gehry,” says Park, “crumpling up paper and giving it to his designers or students and saying, ‘Here, render that!’ This building is very interesting, but it’s not my favourite, to be honest, of his creations.”
I ask her which is, and she names Gehry’s recently completed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, inspired by the glass in the Grand Palais. “I went there for the opening, when Kanye performed,” she says.
We play a quick game of Name The Architect-y Fashion Person and she plumps for the Americans: “Thom Browne! I’m pretty sure he studied it, and didn’t Tom Ford study interior design?” She notes that Vuitton’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, appreciates form, and Louis Vuitton, the brand, clearly does, too – you know, to do something as bold as build the first privately financed public art space in Paris. We talk about how most designers get just as excited about architecture as they do about art and The Arts (with capitals) – because it’s a fallacy that the fashion world is somehow vacuous just because it’s visual.
“It’s all creative, all creating,” says Park. “Some of the things that inspire me most are the conversations I have on shoots, about what films or galleries people have seen recently. So many references come up.”
Then she says, “Mimco is another one, on a different level, of course,” – it’s fair to say the Melbourne-based accessories brand has not yet commissioned a museum – “but I love these pieces from today.” She’s been modelling Mimco’s fierce architectural hair accessories, costume jewellery and envelope clutches. “I am quite new to the brand – I mean, I don’t know too much about the Australians,” says Park. (It’s her first time here.) “But Mimco is fun and energetic, and it can be pretty much on you, as in, how you decide to wear it. I embrace that, from the way I do my hair to how I dress.”
Mimco’s creative and managing director, Cathryn Wills, echoes this when she says they chose Park for spring ’15 because, “She is such a strong woman, both aesthetically and intellectually; she perfectly suits Mimco’s desire to reinforce individuality. She also perfectly matched our fierce, eclectic and art-centric female ‘Ranger’ muse for the season.”
Wills starts each collection by writing a narrative. This time, she dreamt up an urban warrior woman she calls the Atomic Ranger, and sent her stomping through art museums – past Michelangelos, Vermeers and Klimts – clad in utilitarian chic.
All these disparate influences are collected on the Mimco design team’s travels, where they drink up details from architecture and city streets, museums, galleries and flea markets. There’s a heap of work going on behind the scenes before a collection reaches the campaign-shooting stage. It’s fascinating; the journey from first thought to finished piece. Alchemy is often the secret ingredient, what makes the practicality, the engineering, the maths, zing. Like Park says, it’s all creativity, creating.
Sometimes that magic is enhanced with a dash of serendipity. Ruth Walker, Mimco’s design manager for jewellery and accessories, visited Seoul this year, before she “had any idea we’d be working with Soo Joo” (who lived there until she was 10). “Korea was a must for me this time,” says Walker. “Design is all around you. It’s not dissimilar to Japan, in that their design comes from within their culture; they don’t really look outwards.”
Walker made that trip on her own, but she travelled to London, Paris and New York with Wills and Valeria Fioretti, senior design manager for leather. “We are always looking for a new hub, something to fill the tank for inspiration,” says Walker. “We have the ability to bring any idea to life because we build everything from scratch.”
