#1 HotTakeZ: Is Katseye the future of the pop music industry?
Sooo, if you haven't heard about Katseye yet, what kinda media are you consuming pookie? Katseye documentary, anthropology of fashion & K-pop zeitgeist
♨️ Netflix has hit us with a new docu-series in August this year - and we ate it up. Well, I don't know about you, but I certainly did. TO THE LAST CRUMB.
I've never fancied myself an obsessive fan of celebrities or idols (and I'm not about to start now), but there is something so nostalgic about bringing back an all-girls group! 😮💨
If you are like me, you probably grew up with The Pussycat Dolls, Spice Girls, The Cheetah Girls (iykyk😭), and Destiny's Child among other legendary pop performers. The 90s - 2000s were THE time for music groups, and I won't even go into the One Direction (😚) era that followed. But come 2024, pop music in the Western world let go of the group aesthetic and embraced single artists - until now!
Dream Academy: The Debut went public last year and introduced itself to a wider audience as a YouTube show, but we got to see the spicy, behind-the-scenes Netflix documentary drama on our screens this year only in Popstar Academy: Katseye. And oh boy, is there much to see. But let's start from the beginning…
… or the end rather.
Katseye is an all-girls global pop group of 6 members - Sophia, Manon, Lara, Daniela, and Yoon-chae; 6 girls with 6 different backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures created by the music conglomerates H Y B E & Geffen Records under a joint project.
With its roots deep in K-pop, H Y B E decided to globalize it to enter the Western market further and partnered with Geffen, a music industry powerhouse from LA. With a big fat budget, tight timeline, and probably loads of corporate politics to make € out of it, they created Dream Academy ⭐️
“We are not just in a training program. We are in this to become a sensational, iconic, global girl group”. - Netflix documentary Popstar Academy: Katseye
The idea is to take the vigorous Korean training to become an idol and implement it into a global pop group expanding to Western audiences. Sounds pretty cool, right? Except this training is nothing but sweat, blood, tears and life-long trauma with 0.1% chance of becoming a star. And you get a chance to do it all on TV for everyone to witness 🥴
A show or an arena?
120,000 applications were entered from all over the world and only 20 girls made it out to LA to begin training with the best-of-the-best industry performers. The companies were clear - it will last 2 years, you don't really have any time off and we will require everything that you are and more.
One of the reasons this show caught my eye is that one of the 20 chosen ones was a girl from Slovakia to my shock. Don't get me wrong, I was so happy to see some representation. But a girl from Slovakia ? On Netflix? Learning in LA from Hollywood icons? We were all gagged. Slovakia is so tiny some people think we are a part of Hungary. Or they only know about Slovenia. I was her #1 fan for real for that one.
What the girls did not know at the start of this is that while they do get monthly evaluations from their coaches and Son, the BTS choreographer who plays the role of an executive producer, the final decision of who gets the opportunity to be in the group is decided by the public audience. Yopp, they turned it into a survival show which is quite a common occurrence of this genre in South Korea.
H Y B E & Geffen purposefully hooked a worldwide audience into the drama of voted selection of the future ‘Global Girl Group’, hoping it would create an emotional connection between the “eyecons” and the personalities that make the group. Fans especially played a crucial role during the entire competition by voting on Weverse and TikTok which was a carefully planned integration, just like the Netflix documentary. And from what I've seen in my excessive time online, the fans ate it up (I am fans).
Creative direction by the “L.A.fashion fairy godfather Humberto Leon”
Before we do a deep dive into K-pop beyond the borders of South Korea and the relationship of fans with their idols, we HAVE to talk about the fashion. I mean…it’s slaying. The creative director of Katseye is the myth, the legend - Humberto Leon. Ok, gun to my head, I had actually never heard of the man before my eyes got glued to the Katseye documentary. But what I see now, I likey very much.
What I find really cool about Humberto is that he's never actually had any formal training in what he does now - whether that's the fashion world or entering the restaurant business industry. He got his skills through work and his own cultural insights working at Kenzo as the co-creative director with longtime friend & business partner Carol Lim.
When it comes to the fashion choices of Katseye members, Humberto manages to capture their various ethnicities and individuality while still being a part of a unified look together. Coming from a mixed cultural background myself, this is something I really appreciate about their fashion sense. He didn't reduce them to a single visual language either, where it would feel reductive or archetypal like it often happens with girl groups - instead he's establishing freedom based on their ethnicities and taking a lot of inspiration outside of the music industry.
The anthropology of fashion
“We’re a global girl group so we want to make sure that everyone can represent their heritage, where they’re from.” - Manon for L.A. Times
I remember seeing this TikTok recently; a guy dressed fancy was eating at an expensive-looking restaurant. He looked incredibly put together and the vibe he was giving on screen was “I know what I'm talking about”. Coincidentally, the main point of his message was that looks matter. How you dress matters. People will treat you differently because it communicates more than we sometimes realize.
While marketing looks at clothes as fashion statements translating the branding of the whole group, what tone of voice they are following and what role they decided to establish for themselves with their audience, in anthropology clothes have a very symbolic meaning. Terence Turner (1980) coined a fitting term for it - social skin.
“Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes (or their symbolic equivalents). We cannot tell how this came to be, but we can say something about why it should be so and what it means” Terence Turner (1980: 486).
When you think about it, almost every culture has busied themselves with the notion of covering and uncovering their bodies at some point - communicating status, wealth, social standing, community they belong to. Anthropologists have looked at it through the lens of globalization - during our age of hypercommunication thanks to social media and pop culture we are creating a new “world in dress”, as Karen Hansen called it. For many of us it seems frivolous to think about - who cares if I wear the same shirt to work or if my belt matches my shoes? (I care). And so does most people our age to be honest.
The older I get the more I realize how much clothing shapes the perception of you to those around you. In the case of Katseye, it is a unique opportunity to represent their identities while not being reduced to solely one aspect of it - their individual cultures. As a global pop girl group, they stand at the crossroads of pop culture, girlhood, K-pop, and cultural representation. This is an interesting position to be in - and reminds me a LOT of the power girl groups held back in their stardom era.
K-pop zeitgeist: the fantasy of idols
So this is a really interesting concept and I couldn't NOT talk about it because Katseye is not a K-pop girl group; they are global. And yet, besides their training regime and visual performance, they took a lot from K-pop culture:
they were formed by entertainment companies through a survival show creating drama and pulling audiences in so they can already get involved with their stories
each member is on a paid app (Weverse) creating content & BTS outside of music
they have their own role in the group which is decided by management: lead vocalist, lead dancer, those who lean more towards visuals, etc
they are upholding a “clean” image according to the K-pop etiquette
they named their fandom “eyekons” and make sure to correlate this growing relationship in the way they address their audience at public events, among other things.
I've noticed that K-pop goes BEYOND music industry in order to create special relationship between the celebrities (idols) and their fans - extra content where you see the groups in a more casual setting and special access to the idols’ lives. E.g. Katseye's YouTube channel where they participate in different challenges or show you “What's in my lunchbox?”. They make them seem real to the fans, creating a para-social relationship which can (and has) easily turn dangerous. Through all of these interactions they purposely create for you, you start to foster a connection with your idol, albeit it is imaginary. Why? Because there is so much money in the K-pop industry - around 11 trillion South Korean won in 2022, as well as an export value of about 927.6 million U.S. dollars 💀
As the Korean wave of going global grows, I'm super curious on how that’s going to impact the music industry roles of idols and pop groups. There are rumours H Y B E x Geffen are holding more auditions for a next project, so Katseye might not be the only global K-pop inspired group we will be seeing in the near future 👀
But of course…I have questions
Outside of the fact that I like their music and their Netflix documentary was effective in wrapping me around their little multicultural fingers, I do think Katseye gave a way to new music industry standards. There is a lot that can be unpacked here - from their collaborations with brands and other media to the individual roles group members play & how their dynamic evolves with time.
LOVE!