To find the South Korean designer Rejina Pyo, 41, grinning on the fourth floor of the Soho Revue gallery is a remarkable thing. She is dressed in her own beige, pleated skirt, pinstriped white shirt, burnt orange sweater vest and cobalt blue adidas Sambas, busily curating an exhibition which will mark her brand’s decade anniversary. I challenge you to find anyone working in the British fashion industry who will not tell you that is a momentous feat.
Why? Because keeping a fashion brand afloat in London today is — to put it bluntly — an expensive, bloody and often damn-near impossible task. Retail infrastructure is crumbling, aspirational shoppers creep ever closer to going the way of the dodo, and casualties are stacking up. Leading luxury retailer Matches Fashion, one-time high-street overlord Ted Baker, and outfitter of the richest and most famous, The Vampire’s Wife — all have fallen into administration in the last year. Remaining brands are crowding A&E.
Despite this, Pyo is still standing. We are only a stone’s throw from her own shop on Upper St James Street, which opened in 2022 and is currently packed full of her signature style of wearable garments which have attracted a fiercely loyal customer base. “It’s been 10 years but it feels more like 20,” she says. “I appreciate how incredible it is to be a completely independent business at this status. To be loved and standing here — that in itself is amazing.”
Indeed, many would never have guessed it. When she graduated from Saint Martins in 2011, London Fashion Week was more blaring lights, bone-thin models and jelly Christopher Kane jackets than anything more demure. “It was maximalist,” says Pyo. “It felt very much like there was no place for what I love and do — something wearable for real women was not what you strived for.”
Some insiders brushed off her subtlety and sophistication as boring, unadventurous and plain. Well, the joke’s on them. It became her superpower, as so many around her continued sketching wild looks on illustrated figures that sooner resembled silver birches than any paying customer. “It just doesn’t make sense for me to do that,” she says. “When I’m in the designing process, I think about myself, my friends, and all the inspiring women around me. [I also] consider a lot of things.” For example? “Can you actually eat dinner in this?”
Pyo has steadily build a coterie of real women — high flyers in the arts, interior design, even investment banking — who swear by her stark use of colour, sculptural silhouette frocks and playful incorporation of lace, taffeta and chiffons (dresses start at £395; tops £145 and skirts £250; rejinapyo.com).
“Real” stands opposed to slebs who borrow looks for a premiere, something that makes Pyo, if not actually then figuratively, eye roll. “I’m not really bothered about dressing someone on the red carpet and objectifying this person,” she says. “I’m much more interested in someone on the street really working, walking around, wearing the pieces. So many people tell me, ‘Oh my God, this is one of my favourite pieces of clothing that I’ve ever owned.’ That is what I strive for.”
She now lives in “really far-out” north London, with her husband, chef and broadcaster Jordan Bourke, and their two young children. But if you had met Pyo, who was born and raised in Seoul, when she came to the UK in 2008, you might not have expected her to swim rebelliously upstream.
“I came with very little English, and studied under Louise Wilson [the fabled, late Saint Martins tutor]. She was Scottish, and I didn’t understand anything.” Just as well; Wilson was known for her cutting tongue. One lesson did stick with Pyo, though: “Do what you do and do it well and there will be people who find you.”
In the following years, she “did it backwards; building my business before I did the show or anything … a slow race wins”, she says. Her debut catwalk did not come until 2017, when she took over London’s Quaker Centre on Euston Road. It was followed by eight more shows, including one at the Olympic London Aquatics Centre. The last came in September 2022.
She had started to work on plans for a store in the pandemic, after becoming disenchanted with the runway model. She then took “what I understand was a big risk”, and went bricks and mortar. “It was quite daunting. It’s expensive — but I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” It took her business model towards direct to consumer and away from the wholesale system which “is very much power to the retailers” and has transpired to be a lifeline as institutions such as Matches went down. It’s not to say everything is rosy. Companies House shows that the label’s net asset position dropped sharply in the year to April 2024; however, “having the store really allows me to have control”.
She still makes four collections a year, but is looking to cut that back imminently because “there is so much stuff out there, I don’t think we need four”, and turn her focus to expand to a wider lifestyle offering. And Pyo doesn’t shut down the idea of moving to a big house, either, though does see it “like a marriage. I am being careful.” Instead, she favours one-off collaborations, most recently with Mulberry this September. She does make note of the lack of women filling top fashion jobs, saying, witheringly: “It is completely imbalanced.”
Currently, though, she is focused on finishing her exhibition. Called As She Is, it features “female artists who truly inspire me”. Alongside works from Galician-born sculptor Ángela de la Cruz and British painter Chantal Joffe, she is excited to present Korean antiques collected by her mother. “There is a four-generation-old basket, but it’s like a lunch box that they carried food in,” she says. “I grew up around these things at home, but seeing them with a fresh eye, I realised how incredible they are.”
As our conversation comes to an end, she starts discussing a popular Korean personality test she has recently taken. “A capital P person has no plans, and a capital J person has everything all mapped out,” she says. “I am capital P — I feel I’m more of a fluid person, I go with the flow,” she says. I am not so sure. I wonder if she has had this all pencilled out long ago.
“As She Is”, Curated by Rejina Pyo, October 23 to November 2, Soho Revue, sohorevue.com
