Decked in a black silk jacket fixed with an antique butterfly pin, black skirt and black Mary Jane shoes, hanbok designer Lee Young-hee excitedly thrust a photo of Miyuki, wife of former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama, as soon as she sat down in her boutique “Maison de Lee Young-hee” in Sinsa-dong, southern Seoul.

In the photo taken only a few weeks ago, Miyuki is happily serving food at a festival held in Tokyo, wearing a dark pink and violet hanbok, or Korean traditional costume, embroidered with flowers designed by Lee.

“Doesn’t she look pretty? I so wanted to dress her in hanbok. It made me feel very good to know that she was extremely interested in our culture she loves kimchi so much that she always has packs of it in her refrigerator!” Lee told The Korea Herald.

Her excitement was completely understandable, as Lee is the one who introduced hanbok to the world and cleared its name from being “Kimono Coree” a name a French journalist who did not know any better gave to hanbok in the early 1990s, making a hasty decision that it was inspired from the Japanese traditional costume. Better yet, Lee had hanbok nicknamed “costume of the wind“ after enthralling the media numerous times with her dazzling hanbok fashion shows.

Lee, the first-ever Korean designer to participate in Pret-a-Porter Paris in 1993 and the first-ever hanbok designer to showcase in Paris Haute Couture, is one of the most famous hanbok designers in Korea and arguably the best-known one in the world.

The interview went on for about an hour and a half with Lee energetically leading the conversation. With her flawless style, perfectly set hair and makeup, constant girly giggles and her overflowing energy, it was hard to believe that she is 74 years old.

She used to sell bedding but naturally stepped into the hanbok business when she was 40, besieged by requests from her customers. They were fascinated with the naturally-dyed color of the hanbok Lee made with some leftover fabrics. It is actually Lee’s use of colors that later on captivated Parisians and New Yorkers as well.

“When I do something, I have to do it perfectly. I just could not find the colors I wanted, no matter how frequently I searched Dongdaemun or any other markets, so I invented my own colors by naturally dying the materials. I always worked hard because the business is so much fun and here I am now,” said Lee.

She learned her colors from her mother, who never used plain white fabric but dyed everything using natural materials, like gardenia seeds and nut shells. Ever since she could remember, Lee used to hang around her mother, dip fabric in natural dye and discuss the colors. Colors have simply been a big part of her life.

“I discovered that some of the bedding in my house had turned a bit pale yesterday, so I kneaded some gardenia seeds and dyed the sheets right in the kitchen,” she said.

Talent, however, is not enough for success. Another thing that keeps Lee going is her audacity. She is always up to trying something innovative something no one had dared to do before.

She seized the chance to hold a show in Washington in 1983 and paved her way, fiercely, to participate in the 1993 Pret-a-Porter in Paris. She opened Lee Young-hee Museum in New York in 2004 and was honored in 2007 to store 16 of her hanbok at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for the next 100 years.

She has held more than 500 fashion shows and dressed a myriad of celebrities and high-profile figures including the presidents from 21 countries who visited Korea for the APEC meeting in 2005.

“Why try easy things when you go for more difficult goals? If I must say, maybe my talent is that I recognized how wonderful our tradition is, when nobody else noticed it,” said Lee.

She broke into giggles admitting that she was definitely foolhardy, now that she thinks of it, when she opened her boutique in Paris in 1994, only a year after her debut at Pret-a-Porter Paris.

“That was so me. Designers are usually very nervous before their first shows but I wasn’t, even for my very first Pret-a-Porter in Paris. First, because I had confidence in my hanbok and second, because I had been throwing shows overseas for six years and I assumed Paris would not be much different,” she reminisced.

The Haute Couture show held in Paris in July is Lee’s latest achievement. With support from Chungcheong Province which aimed to promote Hansan mosi, or ramie, the main material Lee used for the stage, Lee enthralled the foreign audience, once again. Some even cried, said Lee.

“Unlike Pret-a-Porter, there are so many things to keep in mind when preparing for Haute Couture. Every little detail has to be handmade. It took about a year or two to make one costume. But I remembered how the journalists in Paris used to say ‘Madame Lee should go for Haute Couture’ and so I did. But because there are no supporters for the next season yet, I am going to have to wait and see if I could show there again,” said Lee. She will be showing a part of the Haute Couture collection during Seoul Fashion Week S/S 2011 on Oct. 27.

Lee, also dubbed pioneer of hanbok’s globalization, said that about 80 percent globalization has been achieved.

“It was me, all alone. I never had any support from the government. And the problem is that no one even realizes how much achievement has been made. The whole country is so focused on promoting Korean food no matter how much I insist that it should go with hanbok,” said Lee.

“The world is eyeing our culture now. There should be some fellow designers or juniors that I should be working with, but there isn’t a single hanbok designer who shares my thoughts.”

Lee asserted that hanbok should become a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton or Chanel in order to succeed in globalization.

“I am thinking about making a very ‘Korean’ handbag, leather patterned with Sibjangsaeng or Aster patterns,” said Lee.

“I also have some strikingly innovative ideas for Seoul Fashion Week F/W next year something that could make young people wear hanbok everyday like jeans. I am going to begin to work on it as soon as Seoul Fashion Week S/S 2011 is over.”

By Park Min-young (claire@heraldcorp.com)