Fashion Bulletin: Match making in Incheon Airport, Korea

The first instance was while I was still wandering the bewilderingly indistinguishable halls of the Incheon Airport, dazed after the first 10 hour flight, and walking to stay awake until I got on the second. There they were: young, be-jeaned, and both wearing black zip-up hoodies. Nothing notable in itself, except that "All American Girl" was emblazoned across her chest in pink, and "All American Boy" in a baby-blue equivalent across his.

At first I assumed it was a one-off, a sartorial flourish that - from my cultural perspective at least - had decided to leap-frog "quirky" to leap headlong into "insane". Perhaps my lagging brain was seeing double?  But no, as I headed to the boarding gate I spotted another couple, also locked in garmented betrothal, this time with white hoodies with "love by [heart symbol]" written on the front, which seemed to make made neither fashion nor grammatical sense.

I entertained myself for a while trying to conjure a mental picture of the shock and horror that would disfigure J's handsome visage if I came home with, say, a his-and-hers pair of "Hello Kitty" hoodies. I was mentally filing his likely reaction just after his likely response if I get Born Again and before his reaction to me committing some grisly forms of serial homicide, as a his-and-hers pair of matching Ralph Lauren orange polo shirts with green lettering sauntered by hand-in-hand.

Seated at my gate, the trickle became a flood. Now that I had my eye in, I could see they were everywhere. To my left, matching white bomber jackets with gold dragons. To my right, silky blouson baseball-style zip-up jackets.  A couple near the plastic plant had eschewed the matching wardrobe, but gone with themed dressing instead: different clothes and colours, but both wearing jeans, converse sneakers, t-shirts, baseball jackets and baseball caps. Another couple had decided to go with the radical notion of swapping contrasting colours: his polo shirt was white with purple lettering, hers purple with white lettering. Some were closet (excuse the pun) match-making, hiding identical t-shirts under distinct and individual jackets. Another more shameless pair had decided that matching t-shirts weren't enough, and had paired them with identical jeans, right down to the black and red jewelled"V"s stuck on to the right buttock.

It went on and on. By the time the flight began to board, I had identified at least 15 couples committing public displays of purchasing unity. I could only speculate how this fitted into the complex rituals of young adult romance. Was there gender-based demarcations regarding who did the buying and the gifting, or was a mutual decision, a retail-based consumation? Did splitting up involve ceremonial return of the t-shirt?  Or maybe it was de-rigeur to to keep each one so that in their respective dotages they could sort through their t-shirt drawer on wet Sunday afternoons and reminisce about youthful romance? Maybe it was just that they were all going to Sydney on a holiday, and that taken the whole "Aussies are sporty" thing a little bit too seriously.

On the return trip two weeks later, the airport was again littered with matching couples.  But hitting the streets of Seoul that evening , there was nary a match to be found. The young hipsters cruising through the neon streets on a Friday night would have looked at home in any of the major cities of the world.