Modern Hanbok (A poem)

I'd like to know what a modern hanbok would look like

Not the formal kind worn at weddings

Not the kind that float down a catwalk

The kind an everyday woman would wear

If she were going shopping

If she were going to work

If she were playing with her children

It would have to be machine washable, because there are busy women

It would have to be comfortable, because these are modern women

Maybe it wouldn't need a slip

But it would definitely have to work with sneakers --

After all, this is the twenty-first century

And these women would have had all this time

Evolving their fashions to their tastes

They were never told what they could wear, and what they couldn't,

Under pain of beating or punishment or death

They had agency

They lived in a world that flowed with the currents of their times

And more than once altered those currents themselves

They remembered their halmunis laughing about the pictures they saw of other women,

From other places,

Wearing a hanbok but getting the bow all wrong

Sometimes it's the details

Sometimes it's the attitude

Because there were sometimes when those other women

Got it just right

And they were wearing the clothes

Not the other way around

Just as they -- we -- live in a world in which they lived with their history

And beyond it

Not that they lived for their history

As if they themselves were an offering to it

Sometimes the colors are vibrant

Sometimes the materials are subdued

Always, it is a garment that suits their lives

Not a costume to suit a role

This is, after all, a modern hanbok for a woman in a country that has always known agency