The Alchemy of Hyunjin: W Korea x Givenchy Beauty – September 2025 Edition Book Pictorial

There are editorial moments that feel less like images on glossy pages and more like cultural markers. Hyunjin’s September 2025 cover story with W Korea for Givenchy Beauty is one such artifact—a collision of elegance and rebellion, spectacle and intimacy, the kind of campaign where brand and muse dissolve into each other until you cannot tell where styling ends and persona begins.

“Hyunjin doesn’t wear Givenchy—he embodies it.” That’s the prevailing sentiment as the pictorial unfurls: a study in shadow and light, in sculptural tailoring and skin-bare vulnerability. With Givenchy’s signature edge sharpened into something achingly modern, the Stray Kids member shifts not just into the role of ambassador, but into a new archetype for male beauty in K-pop: unrestrained, fluid, magnetic.

 “A face that speaks every language: couture, K-pop, tomorrow.”

Beauty in Tension

What W Korea manages here is less product promotion and more narrative architecture. The pictorial uses Givenchy Beauty as its vocabulary: a sculpted cheekbone turned into sharp punctuation, a whisper of gloss as quiet poetry, eyeliner sketched like a manifesto. Hyunjin’s face becomes the locus where tension resides—between softness and severity, masculinity and delicacy, idol and icon.

This is beauty as cultural translation. Korean visual tradition—obsessed with ethereality and dreamlike atmospherics—is fused with French couture’s insistence on stark, architectural clarity. Hyunjin, long lauded as the group’s most painterly presence, emerges as the canvas capable of merging both without fracture.

“A face that speaks every language: couture, K-pop, tomorrow.”

“The Performance of Stillness“

Much has been written about Hyunjin as the consummate performer in motion. Yet the power of this pictorial lies in his command of stillness. Every photograph becomes a choreographed gesture of pause: an arched brow that flicks like punctuation, an absent gaze that summons new mythologies. Even the sinuous fall of hair seems deliberate, as if another layer of costuming.

Beauty campaigns often flatten idols into compositions—yet here, Hyunjin resists reduction. There is movement embedded in the quiet. He does not simply pose; he performs restraint.

“Stillness, reimagined as choreography.”

The New Masculine Frontier

Givenchy’s appointment of Hyunjin to front its beauty vision signals more than promotional ambition—it sketches the evolution of what luxury masculinity will look like in the mid-2020s. The emphasis is neither on dominance nor softness, but on an equilibrium between the two: a man who wears lacquered lips and sharp tailoring as confidently as another might wear steel-toe boots.

In him, the codes of the house—structural precision, dark romanticism, a refusal of compromise—are unlocked in fresh ways. Where earlier campaigns sought to polish K-pop idols into European archetypes, with Hyunjin the synchronization feels inverted: the house reshapes itself around his silhouette.

“Not a muse—an axis.”

뷰티 에디터 | 이현정
포토그래퍼 | 안주영
스타일리스트 | 이종현
헤어 | 이현우
메이크업 | 정수연
네일 | 이지희
세트 | 유혜원
어시스턴트 | 엄하빈

Beauty Editor | Lee Hyun-jung
Photographer | Ahn Joo-young
Stylist | Lee Jong-hyun
Hair | Lee Hyun-woo
Makeup | Jung Soo-yeon
Nails | Lee Ji-hee
Set | Yoo Hye-won
Assistant | Eom Ha-bin