South Korean model turned actor Hoyeon Jung covers the March 2022 issue of Vogue Japan. In her role of north Korean defector in the Netflix hit ‘Squid Game’, the 27-year-old is part of an established cast of South Korean actors who comprise Netflix’s most-viewed series ever.

Louis Vuitton’s newest Global House Ambassador for fashion, watches and jewelry wears a Vuitton cape and dress on her Vogue cover, accented with Alexander McQueen earrings. Alex Harrington styles the fashion story [Vogue US February link interview link in English] ‘From Squid Game to Supernova: Inside the Whirlwind with Hoyeon Jung’ with gorgeous elegance from Acne Studios, Givenchy, Junya Watanabe, Loewe, Miu Miu, more Louis Vuutton, Prada, Stella McCartney, Vera Wang and more.

Harley Weir [IG] is behind the lens, shooting a new cover and at least one new editorial image / Hair by Holli Smith; makeup by Thomas de Kluyver for Gucci Beauty.

Vogue’s Monica Kim catches up with Hoyeon Jung at New York’s Soho Grand.

Note to AOC regular readers: As Vogue Global develops a shared content strategy [a policy we understand given Conde Nast recent financial losses in excess of $100 million annually] we want to give our high-level creatives an understanding of one Vogue issue to another edition. At the same time, we are respecting Google’s content redundancy SEO, policy so as to stay on the right side of the cyber law, so to speak.

In this case, the images that are showing are the ones published so far by Vogue Japan March 2022. AOC is not writing new commentary from the interview. We link back to AOC’s US Vogue February 2022, at the end of post, where there will be a duplication of three of these images but also multiple more not appearing in Vogue Japan so far images. Surely there’s a Google penalty in here somewhere, but then Google hasn’t faced these kinds of real-world financial content revenue challenges, so they can have all the rules they want. As a side note, Amazon has been deeply cutting into Google ad revenue.

If you are an AOC reader who speaks Japanese, this link takes you that the Global Vogue interview with Hoyeon Jung in Vogue Japan.

Paragraphs are spent talking about the star’s low self-esteem — probably the most common thread of discussion among women talents these days. Five decades later from the second wave of feminism — with a third wave thrown in to fix all the failings of the second wavers — well, women’s struggles with self-esteem remain front and center.

Without brushing off the self-esteem struggles that affect women deeply, AOC refuses to dwell on them in such a fabulous story about the success of this super-talented young woman Hoyeon Jung.

It was during her first Fashion Week in Paris, in 2016, that she caught the eye of Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton artistic director of women’s collections. “I remember the first thing that struck me was her smile,” he tells me over the phone from L.A. “I remember she had flamboyant red hair, of course a gorgeous silhouette, and such an elegant way of moving. Off of the walk, we already knew she was in—as we say.”

Stylist Aeri Yun plays a pivotal role in the story — and so does New York City, a sentiment so many of us understand.

It was here that she [Hoyeon Jung] began to find peace with the imperfections that had been picked apart by the public. “Growing up, I thought I had so many shortcomings, and I always thought that I had to fix them,” she says. “New York was the first place that told me that they were okay. I remember being so moved.”

The star’s love affair with New York provided its share of model-world challenges, and it’s here that Aeri Yun, stepped directly into her life. As Hoyeon Jung was no longer the “new girl’, she experienced fewer castings, fewer callbacks, fewer shows.

AOC can confirm this reality in our own archives as one year’s star model has almost no features the following year. Career trajectories are very precarious in fashion world, and few models of the moment do not internalize their own “failings” to explain their out-of-demand status.

Aeri Yun’s young son Phillip had a special, surrogate-family relationship with Hoyeon, and she became his caretaker, moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn into a light-filled apartment next to Yun’s own home.

English, martial arts, yoga, acting classes defined the restless model’s time. Self-improvement dominated her consciousness. In January of 2020 — with COVID preparing its descent over New York — Hoyyeon Jung exchanged her Korean modeling agency for an acting agency. Providence was about to make her it’s daughter in a powerful way.

At the same time, in an unmarked production office in Hapjeong-dong, Seoul, Hwang Dong-hyuk was on edge. The 50-year-old South Korean writer-director, best known for his work in feature films, had spent more than three months casting for Squid Game, a battle royale–style TV thriller and passion project 10 years in the making, and still had not found anyone to play the lead female role of the “hard, cold, strong, but vulnerable” Kang Sae-byeok. “I was hoping for someone fresh, with a different aura,” Hwang says. “I was searching for a kind of actor I had never seen before.”

AOC fast-forwards over countless details in the emergence of a beautiful South Korean butterfly woman from her cocoon. In a must-read, inspiring Vogue interview about Hoyeon Jung, leave us now to go in-depth into the story.