“I never thought for a second that I was different,” says designer Jenia Kim, founder and creative director of J.Kim, recalling her childhood in Uzbekistan, surrounded by fellow Koryo-saram families. “I had many Korean friends — they looked like me, ate the same food. We felt at home, comfortable and safe. In our five-story building in Tashkent there were more Koreans than Uzbeks. I never really questioned where I came from or how I ended up there.”

Her life changed dramatically when, at eleven, she moved to Moscow.
“Our family was the only ‘other’ family in the entire neighborhood,” she says. “Russian grandmothers, our neighbors, would look at me as if I were an alien.” Growing up, she often felt isolated and was sometimes the target of racist remarks, without understanding why she was seen as “different.” It wasn’t until she entered university and met other young people from diverse cultural backgrounds that Jenia began to feel accepted and to explore her complex identity.

Her ancestors were poor Korean farmers who first arrived in czarist Russia at the end of the 19th century. They settled in the Far East, in Primorsky Krai, bordering North Korea and China. There, Korean immigrants built their own institutions and spoke their own dialect of Korean. The community thrived until the 1930s, when Japan and the Soviet Union clashed over disputed territories. Stalin grew suspicious of the Korean community’s ties to Japan, and in 1937 around 180,000 ethnic Koreans were loaded into cattle cars and deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan during the Siberian winter. Koreans were among several ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, including Crimean Tatars, who suffered forced migrations during this period.

Since founding the J.Kim label in 2013, Jenia Kim has been working through her roots, constantly looking back at the price of this heritage. She began to ask herself what a national costume for Koryo-saram might look like — a garment that would absorb not only Korean, Uzbek, and Soviet motifs, but also the complex history of a community whose story was silenced for decades. “Now I feel that this costume is my mission,” she says. “I’m trying to find a way to realize it at the intersection of Uzbek, Korean, and Russian cultures.” Later, this colorful jacket — her first attempt to assemble a personal version of a folk costume from fragments of memory — was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of the show Hallyu! The Korean Wave, where it was presented as a piece of the visual heritage of the Koryo-saram community.

Uzbek photographer Hassan Kurbanbaev captured this project for Vogue; the full series and original story are available online. In the images, young women wear Korean jeogori sewn from traditional Uzbek fabrics known as bekasam, as well as Soviet-era materials like jacquard viscose. They appear as fleeting fragments from Jenia’s childhood memories of life in a five-story building in Tashkent, at a time when she could not yet imagine the difficult journey her Koryo-saram community had endured.