Photo Credits: Vogue Korea. Crocs. Starship Entertainmment

There is an art to contradiction, and Rei of IVE wears it like a second skin. In her latest pictorial for Vogue Korea’s September issue—a collaboration with Crocs that seems almost rebellious in its audacity—Rei becomes a study in modern dualities: street comfort refracted through the lens of high fashion, nostalgia infused with an avant-garde charge.

In the photographs, Rei does not merely wear Crocs. She orchestrates a visual dialogue between the brand’s playful accessibility and the cultivated, almost sculptural sophistication long expected of a September issue muse. Styled with razor-sharp tailoring one moment and diaphanous lace in another, the Crocs at her feet seem less like footwear and more like punctuation marks in a poem of youth culture.

“Comfort is no longer casual—it’s couture.”

What makes Rei such a fitting subject for this experiment is her unshakable presence—a gaze both tender and confrontational, the kind of look that unsettles the hierarchy of fashion. With every frame, she dares the audience to reconsider what it means to be aspirational in 2025. Is desire measured in couture credentials, or is it located in the freedom to slip on molded rubber and still radiate luxury?

The issue stakes its argument boldly: when someone like Rei moves, the boundaries follow. In her hands (and on her feet), Crocs are no longer aligned simply with practical comfort—they become talismanic objects of style, sculpted for a new generation unafraid of collapsing grandeur and ease into one singular narrative. Her pictorial is not satire; it is transformation.

“Fashion’s boldest power move: collapsing luxury and leisure into one.”

This feature hums with a quiet thesis: accessibility is no longer fashion’s foil. Rei and Vogue Korea expose how even the most quotidian of objects can evolve into myth when worn with clarity, confidence, and a refusal to bow to expectation. It is less about democratizing luxury, and more about reprogramming it.

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