The names of garments are falling. Only the names of the apps are rising

To find out how clothes are being chosen in Korea, two sets were followed at once. One is garment names — dress, knit, cardigan, coat, padded jacket. The other is app names — 무신사, 29CM, 에이블리, 지그재그, 퀸잇.

Two years of figures came out cleanly opposed. Every garment fell. Almost every app rose.

The garment words are down by roughly a third in two years

There is no exception in the list. Because each month is set against the matching month, the weather is already taken out — so this cannot be settled with “it was a warm year, so coats fell.”

Almost every app name went up

Of the 59 words this site follows, 47 are lower than a year earlier. Four of these five are higher. It is one of the few sets running against the general condition.

The five apps are selling five different things

무신사 started life as an online community for streetwear and grew from there into the largest fashion platform in Korea. It is also the company with its base in Seongsu-dong. Among these five it is the generalist.

29CM is run by the same owner but has a different character. It carries fewer items and writes long copy for each one, and the prices sit higher. It is the one that grew most over the two years, at +16%.

지그재그 and 에이블리 are both women's select platforms, each gathering a large number of small shops into a single app. 에이블리 being the only one down (−6%) reads most naturally as the two of them taking from the same pool, but these figures cannot confirm that.

퀸잇 states that it is for women in their 40s and 50s, and it is the smallest of the five at 3.0. But at +13% its growth rate is the second highest.

The age-declaring searches say the opposite

That position for 퀸잇 clashes with another way of measuring. Line up search words that name an age group and a completely different picture appears.

미시룩 returned a figure on every day of the month and averaged 16.7. 20대 패션 came back on 6 of 17 days, and even across those 6 it averages 0.6. Days with no figure are not zeros — they fell below the reporting floor — so the true gap is wider than the close to 29 times the returning days already show.

Read alone, that table points to a conclusion: the people shopping for clothes online in Korea are mostly middle-aged. The app figures say the reverse. 퀸잇, the one aimed at 40s and 50s, is the smallest at 3.0, and the four used by younger shoppers add up to close to 20 times it.

The reason for the clash is probably in the words themselves. Someone in their 20s does not search “fashion for 20s.” They type 가을 코디, autumn outfit. Declaring your own age is what you do when you feel outside the default. The size of 미시룩 is therefore not a count of people but a measure of how many people need to name their age.

Guessing age from the app name works, at least in order

So the apps were measured for age as well. NAVER Shopping has a mechanism that returns the age composition of the people who searched a given word. Thirteen months were taken for three of them: 무신사, 지그재그 and 퀸잇.

The order matches exactly the age each app says it is for. 퀸잇, which states 40s and 50s, stands out at 86.6%, and 지그재그, aimed at women in their 20s and 30s, is the youngest. Inferring age from an app name is correct at least about the order.

The heights cannot be read. Even 지그재그, the youngest of the three, is over 70% aged 40 and above. This is not the composition of the app's users. It is the composition of the people who searched that name on NAVER, and NAVER's own user body leans towards the older brackets.

That is also where 미시룩 connects. On the search-box side, whichever app you take, the over-40s are the majority. Age-declaring search words coming out large is explained by the same fact. The NAVER search box is a place where the older brackets are. Younger shoppers are opening the app without passing through the box — which is the other side of the shape this article started with: garment names down, app names up.

In the videos too, half were declaring an age

The same shape shows up in video. In the same week, new videos were collected from 가을 코디 (autumn outfit), a phrase containing no age word at all. Seven came back, 98,000 views between them.

Three of the seven named an age group in the title: 미시패션, 30대패션, 40대패션, 50대패션, 중년패션코디, 4050, 5070여성옷. One more has 중년여 (middle-aged women) in the channel name itself. Search with a word that contains no age, and more than half of what comes back arrives from the age-declaring side.

Among the rest, one stood out.

가을 코디 밋밋하다면 이렇게 입어보세요…지그재그 쇼핑몰 추천 에이블리 (If your autumn outfit feels flat, try wearing it like this… Zigzag shop recommendations, Ably)

YouTube, from the entry word 가을 코디. 13,000 views over the most recent seven days

It points at a destination with app names rather than an age. One side declares an age, the other gives the name of an app. From a single entry — autumn outfit — the two ways of speaking come back side by side. The split visible in the search figures is sitting inside the video titles too.

If you want to measure people, where they go is firmer than what they are called. An app name asks nobody to declare their age.

The search box has become the place where you open an app

What it means that garments fell while apps rose is probably simple. The step of typing 원피스 and comparing the results has been dropped. You see something on social media or in a video, you open the app, and you look inside it. The only thing typed into the box is the name of the app.

The shape is not confined to clothes. Over the same two years, searches for Daiso rose 22% while the names of categories and concepts almost all fell. Only retailer names rising is a tendency that crosses fields.

Inside the app is outside the search

What has been established here stops at who searches the app names. What people choose after opening the app sits outside search, and this method does not reach it.

One thread is left. Take the same breakdown by device and 지그재그 alone has 37.3% coming from desktop. 무신사 is 10.7% and 퀸잇 16.7%. Why would the name of an app built for phones be looked up from a computer? Pulling that thread should show a little more of who uses app names and how, and that is where the next piece starts.

From the desk. If you want to see what Korea is wearing, installing these four apps gets you there faster than walking the shops. Much of what hangs in the physical stores is put out by the same brands on these platforms.

Only the differences in character need remembering. For breadth, 무신사. To have the choosing done for you, 29CM. To hold the price down, 지그재그 or 에이블리. Whether sign-up and shipping work from outside Korea differs by app, so that part has to be checked case by case.

And if you do go to Seongsu-dong: this is the neighbourhood where 무신사 has its base. It is a convenient distance for seeing what kind of place the things inside the app come out of.