Some weekends are for hiking. Some are for catching up on sleep. And once in a while you get to buy clothes straight out of your favorite musicians' closets, handed over by the musicians themselves.
My daughter and I got the third kind this holiday weekend. Friday, October 9 was Hangul Day (yes, Korea gives its alphabet a day off), and the band HYUKOH used it for a one-day flea market they called "losing day with friends."
I went as the driver and the bag-carrier. My daughter went as the expert. Good call, as it turned out.
HYUKOH, for the K-pop crowd
If your Korean music diet is mostly idols, here's the short version. HYUKOH is a four-piece rock band fronted by singer-songwriter Oh Hyuk, and in Korean indie music they're about as big as it gets. "Wi Ing Wi Ing" and "Tomboy" got them noticed in the mid-2010s, and plenty of their fans wouldn't call themselves K-pop fans at all. This is year twelve for them.
Then came a long quiet stretch, six years with no new songs. Since August they've put out three singles: "Godspeed!", "KoK" and now "지는 날 (Losing Day)." Three in a row, so of course fans are betting on a full album. The new one sounds bright and bouncy while the lyrics describe a day when everything goes wrong. You end up nodding along to a song about losing. Very HYUKOH.
D&Department, Seogyo-dong
The market was at D&Department Seoul by MMMG in Seogyo-dong, over on the Hongdae and Hapjeong side of town, where indie bands and tiny design shops have hung around for decades. D&Department started in Japan, and the Seoul shop sells the same sort of stuff: everyday things somebody picked carefully and expects you to keep for years. Kind of the right host for a market that was all about taste.
Most of the action was outside. Clothing racks lined up under a wooden canopy, booths along the courtyard, and a big crowd. A public holiday plus a famous band. No surprise.
The sellers were the stars
This is what made it more than a merch sale. The artists didn't just lend their names. They were standing behind the tables.
HYUKOH were the hosts, selling their own clothes and belongings. Kiha Chang was there too (if you know Korean rock, you know that voice from Kiha & The Faces), sharing a booth called Neogul Market with Car, the Garden, the singer-songwriter behind all those soulful ballads. And JNKYRD, the producer and DJ who works closely with HYUKOH, was selling as well. We met every one of them in person.
I usually see these people on TV or hear them coming out of my daughter's room. Seeing them behind a folding table was a little surreal. No security line, no glass window. They chatted with visitors, explained where a piece came from, and bagged it up like any vendor at a neighborhood market.
The best part? The members sold their things themselves, and that included the haggling. You'd ask how much, they'd name a price, and then you could try to talk it down a little. They played along with a smile. Bargaining with a rock star over a shirt is not something I expected to do on a public holiday, and it was honestly the most fun part of the day.
Around them were vintage shops, art-book publishers, designers and food stalls from the band's wider circle. It felt less like a fan event and more like a giant garage sale thrown by a group of very stylish friends.
And there were plenty of other sellers, too. Honestly, I couldn't tell which ones were famous and which were just very stylish regular people. When I checked the official seller list later, it also included singer-songwriter Chawool and director Yeo Shin-dong, who has worked with HYUKOH for years, along with a long list of small brands and shops. So some of the "regular people" I walked past were probably not so regular.
My daughter's haul
She knows this music way better than I do. So she led, I followed. And no, she didn't come home empty-handed: a few shirts from Kiha Chang and HYUKOH, picked out at their booths with the owners standing right there, after a bit of friendly haggling.
Merch is merch. A shirt that actually hung in Kiha Chang's or HYUKOH's closet, bought from them in person, is a story she'll be telling for years. I mostly nodded and held the bags. I'll admit the excitement rubbed off on me, though.
Records, tube amps and a mini golf course
Vinyl, tube amps and a speaker cabinet about as tall as a person, set up right in the courtyard.
It wasn't only shopping. Out in the courtyard, a DJ was playing vinyl through a row of vintage-looking tube amps and a huge speaker cabinet. The organizers also set up a listening station with records picked by the band members and their friends.
"Sky World Country Club": putt the golf ball, knock the little markers down.
And then there was this: a tabletop golf game called "Sky World Country Club." It's a golf version of bisekchigi (비석치기), an old Korean schoolyard game where you try to knock over a standing stone marker. Here you use a real putter and a golf ball on a strip of fake grass and try to topple the little markers. We skipped this one ourselves, but it's a clever twist on a game most Koreans my age grew up with.
There was also a silkscreen booth. Bring your own T-shirt or tote bag and they'd print HYUKOH's new logo on it, one per person.
If you catch a pop-up like this in Seoul
Korean artists hold pop-ups like this fairly often, especially around a new release, so a few things I'd pass on. Go early. The waitlist opened at noon and people went in by number, and on a holiday that list fills fast. Know the limits before you start grabbing, since the HYUKOH booth capped it at three items per person. If there's a printing booth, bring a plain tee or tote.
Haggling was fine here because the sellers set their own prices. Just keep it friendly. Follow the artists on Instagram, too, because these things often get announced only a few days ahead and that's where the seller lineups show up. And if you can, bring someone who knows the scene. Mine was my daughter, and she made the day.
I came home with a new appreciation for how Korea's indie scene works. It's a close-knit bunch of musicians, designers and small shop owners who clearly like each other, and for one afternoon they opened their closets, literally, to the rest of us.
The celebration kept going, too. On October 11 HYUKOH played "LIVE FROM YEONNAM," a rare 150-seat show at Channel 1969 in Yeonnam-dong.
Official info
Details as of 2026-10-11.
- HYUKOH official Instagram
- HYUKOH's agency announcement: new single "Losing Day," flea market and Yeonnam show (Newsin, Korean)
More from this blog:
- Hangul Day in Korea (October 9): Why an Alphabet Gets Its Own National Holiday
- Why RESCENE Is Gaining Attention in Korea Beyond "Pretty Girl"
Have you ever bought something directly from an artist at a pop-up in Korea?
Photos: A Korean's Take (HYUKOH flea market, D&Department Seoul, October 9, 2026).
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