Seongsu,
Where the Spirits
of Car Washers
Are Floating in the Air
(or the brooklyn of seoul )
According to Seah, the hip wave truly hit Seongsu after Covid-19. According to Korean think tanks, Seongsu was the place that tagged them most on Instagram in 2022. (But that could also be due to the constant pop ups at Seongsu that would often make you tag them in your story, etc). Still, Sound su is unarguably still on the rise.
Historically, Seongsu wasn’t a place you visited unless you needed your car washed — maybe. But by the mid-2010s, small shops and restaurants started to pop up, and in 2022, the neighborhood’s popularity peaked when Dior placed their flagship store there.
Walking through Seongsu feels like floating through a collage, where images of the new and modern are pasted over the raw, industrial nude, and the crumbling paint on the walls hastily covered with fresh white paint, layers of new posters stuck over old, faded ones. It’s a blend of high and low, but less polished: a strange mix of the digital and the decaying.
Concrete walls dazzle with bright visuals, ads, and graphics. Entrances to multi-story vibrant stores are decked out with decorations, installations, and tiny gardens that guide your way inside. Even trash cans outside coffee shops are arranged into neat, deliberate patterns.
At Seongsu, don’t forget to check out the famous salt bread location. Although, it's hard not to —the scent and lengthy line will guide you towards the salt bread spot even against your intentions.
In Seongsu you will find all the popular clothing and accessory brands—Musinsa, Osoi, Matin Kim, Musinsa, and even 032c—a culture magazine, started in Berlin— clothing store. Among other things: Tamburins, built on ruins, a million stationary good stores, and also another Nudake location, where every chair is different, placed neatly around the round tables, exhibiting the goth desserts.
The rooftops in Seongsu — like one at the famous coffee shop Onion — is a whole different story. They open up into a bird’s-eye view of bare wires, active construction sites, and old industrial shops still clinging to the outskirts, just hidden away from Seongsu’s "furnished" core.
Onion was one of the first "on-theme" coffee shops I visited in Seoul, and it will always be my favorite.
The inside is so spacious you can easily lose each other wandering through mazes of semi-ruins — it's set inside what looks like a mid-renovation car shop building, scraped half-clean but still very raw.
Sitting there feels modern and chic, but also a bit like you’re camping out in the house your grandpa swore he’ll finish building but never really did.
The building looks like it was taken out of East Berlin’s Kreuzberg, bustling with clubs built in the old warehouses.
The pastries at Onion are unique and striking, their colors ranging from greens to deep beiges to blacks.
Another thing that made Onion stand out from the endless crowd of cafes was the quality of the food — something Vera also points out.
Half the time, she says, cafes in Korea are all about the vibe: “I think 90% of the cafes I went to, I was underwhelmed by the food or the drinks.”
But Onion stood out to her — the sweets were perfectly consistent, and the coffee, brewed in-house, was just as good.
Seong-su needs to be visited at least once just to experience how well constructed the whole area is. It leads you in, guiding you on your way, carefully taking you through all the stores and locations, pointing out every pop-up, cafe, and art installation you need to see. It’s a place that, I believe, mingles everyone together the most. There, you’ll see foreigners and Koreans alike, princess balletcore girls, and the dark academia ones, Gen Z and millennials (but, thank god, not a lot of Gen Alpha yet).
To end this on an educational note: I really didn’t buy that much in Seoul!
For me it was never about the products, whose quality can sometimes be questioned (not the case with high-end brands, of course), but about the experience. The presentation alone would sometimes sell me things. Do you think I needed that “Sin & Pleasure” perfume? The matte red packaging, the pen and the notebook I was given with it was irresistible.
I truly think for the new generation, growing up on fast-paced trends and TikTok, the generation that will think they know everything about anything—fashion, music, culture, the theme and the concept is extremely important for that generation.
To end this on an educational note: I really didn’t buy that much in Seoul!
For me, it was never about the products, whose quality can sometimes be questionable (not the case with high-end brands, of course), but about the experience. The presentation alone would sometimes sell me things. Do you think I needed that “Sin & Pleasure” perfume? The matte red packaging, the pen, and the notebook I was given with it were irresistible.
I truly think that for the new generation, growing up on fast-paced trends and TikTok — the generation that will believe they know everything about anything — fashion, music, culture — the theme and the concept are extremely important. It will provide them with content for their social media, Substack analysis posts, and show-off essays—like this one.