Laura Park is a hanbok business owner based in Los Angeles. She was born in 1964 to a family that operated a textile store in Gwangjang Market in Seoul and recounted a comfortable childhood containing memories of time spent at her parent’s store. She explains how the store had been in operation since before she was born: her mother had begun working in the market when she was 18, and by the time Laura came around, she was running a textile business that had become woven into the fabric of Gwangjang. Laura initially expressed an interest in languages and so worked as a translator for diplomatic correspondences between Korea and Japan ahead of the 1988 Olympics, but realized that her true passions lay in business; with the money earned from working as a translator, she moved to Los Angeles, where her uncle lived. Following in the footsteps of her parents, she opened a hanbok store which she called “Lee Hwa Korean Traditional Dress;” before long, she was selling wedding dresses as well, and so renamed the store to “Lee Hwa Wedding and Korean Traditional Dress.” As more and more non-Koreans became familiar with what a hanbok was, she renamed her store to “Lee Hwa Wedding and Hanbok,” a final DBA change that reflected shifting attitudes toward Korean culture in the United States. Today, most of her customers are non-Korean—compared to her clientele being 90% Korean when she first began her business—and her store caters to three styles of hanbok: traditional attire, modernized, and streetwear.
