Miss Sohee Is Making Her Own Mark on Haute Couture

If you’ve never seen a Miss Sohee haute couture gown in the flesh, you must watch a video or find a way to catch a glimpse of someone wearing one. Designer Sohee Park’s gowns move differently. They glide and float, their trains and bell-shaped bottoms swanning like liquid magic on a runway. Some might even compare them to real-life Disney princess gowns, with their dramatic silhouettes, baby-pastel hues, elegant textures, pristine craftsmanship, and divinely feminine aesthetic.

“What’s really special about couture is that there are no boundaries between art and fashion,” Park told W a few days ahead of presenting her spring 2025 collection in Paris on January 30. “And if you separate art and fashion, there are so many limits. It’s like sculpting on the body for me, or even painting—because these big silhouettes become a canvas.”

In 2025, it’s rare for an emerging designer to solely focus on couture, but that’s Miss Sohee’s total devotion. The South Korea-born designer went viral in 2020 when she released her first collection on Instagram as a new Central Saint Martins graduate. Even through a phone screen, her shining floral-inspired gowns were breathtaking, and an instant hit for red carpets, where celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Bella Hadid, Ariana Grande, and many others have been seen wearing Miss Sohee creations. For the past five years, Park has been showing during Paris couture week on and off. But for spring 2025, she’s officially on the schedule as a guest designer for the first time, making her stand out as one of the youngest—and one of the very few women designers—on the schedule.

Her signature? Besides big, belle-of-the-ball-style gowns, she puts a focus on couture-ified corsets built within her gowns. “I take inspiration from natural objects like petals or shells. I take these shapes and place them onto the body,” Park said. “It is very sculptural, but it still brings out the feminine shape.” Another specialty of the designer’s: Korean traditional craftsmanship, like najeonchilgi, a technique of inlaying mother-of-pearl landscapes into lacquerware and embroidery inspired by Minhwa, a type of Korean folk art.

Miss Sohee used both of those techniques and she also went darker for her spring 2025 collection in Paris. “It’s edgier and there are a lot of new materials that we’re using, such as creating sculptures with leather and leather corsetry,” Park said. Coco Rocha opened the show in a black leather petal-shaped mini dress with a lace bodysuit; in addition to all the sparkling, glittery, girly gowns there were also flashes of darkness and elements of the coquette aesthetic. “I look into my heritage a lot when I design a collection,” Park added. “So I was exploring mother-of-pearl works on lacquer. But this time I’m taking a new approach, taking inspiration from very dark things. There’s a lot of black throughout the entire collection, harmonizing with very soft tones like lilac, dusty pink, champagne. It’s quite muted compared to the previous collections.”

The show notes mentioned Park envisioning “a noblewoman from the Korean Chosun dynasty,” and “drawing parallels between traditional Korean and Western dress.” Black velvet, chantilly lace on big, voluminous shapes and tailored gowns and suits are all a part of the new look for the brand. Park also looked back to one of her most viral creations of all time and tinkered with it for spring 2025: a black velvet gown with petals on the hips worn by Megan Fox to the Vanity Fair Oscars Party from the spring 2023 collection. This time, it’s done in croc-embossed leather.

It’s not surprising Miss Sohee has such a strong visual identity, since Park comes from a long line of creatives. “Watching my grandmother, she loved to do traditional embroidery herself, and my mother is an artist,” she said. “Growing up, it naturally influenced me a lot.” When she was young, she was a painter; in middle school, Park saw one of Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel haute couture shows and fell in love with the craft of fashion. She moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins and worked under Marc Jacobs on his runway team while in college. “It opened my eyes to how beautiful embroideries and fabric manipulation could bring amazing gowns to life,” she said.

For now, the designer plans to continue creating fantastical pieces over more everyday, toned-down ready-to-wear. “Doing couture, you get to meet so many amazing clients who support me and believe in my vision to create these special pieces for them,” she said. “This is something that you can’t really experience doing ready-to-wear because [the pieces are] being mass produced and you rarely get to see your customers.”

Besides all the celebrities who wear her work on the red carpet, Park has built a steady stream of customers, mainly from the Middle East. “The majority of them are from the royal families there,” she noted. Park visits them in person and sketches on the spot to come up with a design, before deciding on a timeline of multiple fittings. Some dresses, especially wedding gowns, take up to a year to create. Still, four brides got married in Miss Sohee gowns in November and December 2024 alone.

Couture is one of the oldest forms of fashion. Before fast fashion and industrialization, people had their clothing made for them. An old-world concept like haute couture needs fresh energy—and Miss Sohee is the perfect one to deliver her own vision.