Exploring ‘New Hanbok’ trends: a big-data analysis of Korean news media discourse

This study examines how New Hanbok trends, in which traditional Hanbok is reinterpreted within contemporary sociocultural transformations, have been represented and discussed in news media discourse. To this end, big-data analysis, including keyword analysis, clustering analysis, and LDA topic modelling, was conducted on Korean news media articles published between 2014 and 2024. The eleven-year period was divided into three phases (2014–2017, 2018–2021, and 2022–2024), and changes in phase-specific key terms and discursive emphases were compared. The findings indicate that New Hanbok has been represented within different contextual frames across phases. In the early period, policy-driven and institutional contexts, as well as cultural events, were relatively emphasised. This was followed by increased prominence of brand collaborations and popular culture contexts. In the most recent phase, New Hanbok has more frequently been discussed in relation to digital platforms and sustainability-related issues. Topic modelling identified four major discursive configurations in which traditional elements were discussed alongside everyday fashion, institutional cultural programmes, global cultural contexts, and industrial textile innovation. From the perspective of cultural hybridity, these findings suggest that New Hanbok has not been presented as a fixed traditional garment, but has been discursively recontextualised at the intersections of tradition and modernity, the local and the global, and institutional and popular dimensions. In this study, cultural hybridity is employed not as a normative model, but as an analytical perspective for interpreting patterns of meaning construction within news media discourse. By constructing a diachronic news media corpus, this study provides an analytical foundation for understanding shifts in New Hanbok discourse over time and offers baseline data for future research on New Hanbok design and consumer studies, media discourse analysis, and global cultural circulation.