The Bite Magazine - Autumn/Winter 2025 - Issue 38

EENK Mia Zhang looks at fashion brand EENK’s AW25 ‘B for Binding’ collection shown at Milan Fashion Week. F or EENK, a playful variation of the word ‘INK’ in- spired by the recurring letter ‘E’ in the designer’s name, fashion has never been about a single season. Under founder Hyemee Lee’s creative direction, the Seoul-based label has long built its identity around an am- bitious alphabet project, with each collection corresponding to a letter that unfolds a world. After A for Aesthetics, which paid homage to vintage classics and the lineage of Korean craft, this season, the narrative turns a page. It becomes ‘B for Binding’, a meditation on connection, memory, and the quiet act of making meaning. The metaphor is a deceptively simple book. The designer be- gins with paper, rather than fabric, gathering words into sen- tences, then stories and pages into volumes. As a book binds fragments into a coherent whole, Lee’s collection binds eras, genders, and cultures into a cohesive whole. In doing so, it transforms the structure of a garment into a living archive of text written in thread, rather than ink. This philosophy of interconnectedness has defined EENK since its inception. The brand has always embraced hybrid- ity, where a blazer might carry the soft drape of hanbok sleeves, or a pleated skirt might conceal the functional pre- cision of military tailoring. But with ‘B for Binding’, the fu- sion becomes explicitly narrative. Each silhouette reads like a paragraph and each texture like a phrase, making the gar- ments feel alive with grammar. This season, Lee’s point of departure was the work of Kim- sooja, the Korean conceptual artist whose ‘To Breathe – Constellation’ installation at Paris’ Bourse de Commerce left a lingering impression on her. The artist’s expansive, medita- tive, and intensely tactile universe reimagines the needle and thread as instruments of philosophy rather than domestic tools. For the designer, the practice of stitching Bojagi tex- tiles into translucent constellations becomes aesthetic and a spiritual inspiration. In ‘B for Binding’, this influence translates into garments that breathe. Layers of silk and wool move like pages turning in the wind. A floor-length dress ripples with soft pleats that resemble the shelves of a bookcase, folds upon folds, stories stacked in motion. An outerwear piece fuses the crisp struc- ture of a shirt with the authority of a tailored jacket, creating an ensemble that is neither one nor the other but something between an evolution of form. EENK’s fascination with multiplicity extends to materials. The brand’s craftsmanship has always been rooted in metic- ulous Korean construction but filtered through a cosmopoli- tan lens. Here, fabrics of contrasting densities, such as velvet and nylon, cashmere and organza, are layered with purpose. They mirror the logic of syntax, rhythm, and pause, language with threads glinting under light like lines of poetry crossing a page. The colour story mirrors the conceptual foundation. While Lee remains faithful to a palette that honours natural ma- terials, muted ivory, aged ink black, and parchment beige, she introduces sudden flashes of electric blue and burnished silver, like editorial marks on a manuscript. These tones lend the collection a temporal quality, blending ancient and mod- ern elements, hand-bound and digitally coded. There is also a subtle performance embedded within the col- lection’s gestures. The movement of fabric, the flutter of lay- ered hems, and the gentle swish of a coat catching air evoke Kimsooja’s stainless steel sculptures, which refract space into infinite fragments. At a glance, a knitted sweater appears to coil around the torso like a rolled scroll. In another, a bag knotted in the tradition of Bottari becomes both accessory and metaphor, carrying memories rather than objects. What makes this collection striking is how it reconciles in- tellect with intimacy. It’s a presentation that asks to be read as much as worn. Lee constructs clothes like sentences with rhythm, punctuation, and even subtext. Yet the result nev- er feels over-conceptual. The garments are tactile, human, each seam a line of poetry. The model’s silhouettes seemed to float, evoking the serenity of turning pages, the calm focus of reading in solitude. This idea of binding disparate fragments into coherence res- onates far beyond design. It gestures to a world fractured by speed and digital isolation, where connection often feels su- perficial. The designer’s response is to slow down and stitch meaning literally into fabric. Her garments convey a differ- bitedesigner