MAM
The birth of Korean cool: how Seoul hacked the world’s taste buds
MUMBAI: This is a book the Indian prime minister’s office ought to read between policy briefs—and then read again with a highlighter. Ditto Ashwini Vaishnaw and the mandarins at the ministry of information and broadcasting. Narendra Modi has spoken often about exporting India’s soft power; he has even launched Waves to push Indian content abroad. Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool shows, briskly and unsentimentally, how another Asian countries actually did it.
First published in 2014 and expanded for 2025, the book is part reportage, part cultural history and part field manual. Hong, a Paris-based journalist, dissects how a war-battered, culturally insecure South Korea retooled itself into a global style factory. The lesson is bracing: Korean cool did not “go viral”. It was planned.
Hong’s central argument is gloriously unfashionable. Hallyu—the Korean wave—was not an accident of youthful exuberance but a state project, designed with bureaucratic zeal. Around 2000, president Kim Dae-jung looked at America’s film revenues and Britain’s stage musicals and drew a blunt conclusion: culture pays. He set up a Cultural Content Office with a $50 million annual budget. That pot swelled to $500 million. Today it is closer to $5 billion, still fuelling Korea’s pop exports.
A financial crisis provided the shove. When heavy industry sputtered, policymakers pivoted to pop. Culture, they decided, was not fluff but infrastructure. Long before K-pop hijacked playlists and K-dramas colonised Netflix queues, Seoul chose to subsidise desire—with spreadsheets, grants and a steely long game.
The book is at its sharpest when Hong punctures the myth of effortless cool. She tours idol boot camps that would make investment bankers blanch, a society obsessed with polish, and an ecosystem where failure is not romanticised but fixed. Cool, she argues, can be trained—sometimes brutally.
She is no evangelist. With dry wit, Hong exposes the darker underside: pressure-cooker perfectionism, the commodification of youth, the relentless optimisation of faces, bodies and emotions. Korean cool, she reminds readers, is as much factory as fantasy.Stylistically, the book moves at K-pop tempo—snappy, self-aware, lightly irreverent. Hongwrites like an insider with a sceptic’s eyebrow permanently raised. The prose is sharp without being academic. This is economics in eyeliner.
If there is a flaw, it is deliberate. Readers seeking obsessive deep dives into specific bands or shows may find Hong more interested in systems than stars. But that, too, is the point. This is not fandom. It is a study of how nations brand themselves—and win.
The Birth of Korean Cool is ultimately a warning to every country chasing relevance. Soft power is not vibes; it is policy. Cool is not magic; it is management. Seoul did not wait to be discovered. It engineered desire—and exported it. The rest of the world is still humming along, trying to catch the tune.
(Thanks to Sameer Nair for the gift. Paperback available on Amazon at Rs 1,612. Publisher: Picador; pp 331.)
Brands
Estée Lauder to shed 10,000 jobs as new boss bets on digital shift
The cosmetics giant raises its profit outlook but stays silent on a possible merger with Spain’s Puig, as job cuts deepen and a three-year sales slump weighs on the turnaround
NEW YORK: Stéphane de La Faverie is not done cutting. Estée Lauder announced on Friday that it plans to eliminate as many as 3,000 additional jobs, taking its total redundancy programme to as many as 10,000 roles, up from a previous target of 7,000 announced a year ago. The company, which owns La Mer, The Ordinary, Tom Ford, and Aveda, employs roughly 57,000 people worldwide. The mathematics of what is now being contemplated is stark.
The fresh round of cuts is expected to generate a further $200 million in savings, bringing the total annual savings from the programme to as much as $1.2 billion before taxes. That money, De La Faverie has made clear, will be ploughed back into the turnaround.
A CEO in a hurry
De La Faverie, who took the helm in January 2025, inherited a company that had endured three consecutive years of annual sales declines. His response has been to move fast and cut deep. A significant portion of the latest redundancies reflects his push to reduce headcount at US department stores, long a cornerstone of Estée Lauder’s distribution model but now a channel in structural decline. In their place, he is accelerating the shift toward faster-growing online platforms, including Amazon.com and TikTok Shop, a pivot that is reshaping not just where Estée Lauder sells but how it thinks about its customers.
The numbers are moving in the right direction
Despite the pain, there are signs the medicine is working. Estée Lauder raised its profit outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, guiding for adjusted earnings per share in the range of $2.35 to $2.45, above analyst estimates and a notable step up from the $2.05 to $2.25 range it had guided for in February. Organic net sales growth is expected to come in at 3 per cent, the company said, at the high end of the range it set out in February.
The share price tells a mixed story. After De La Faverie took charge, the stock surged nearly 60 per cent, buoyed by investor optimism that a longtime company insider could finally arrest the decline. But 2026 has been rougher: the shares have fallen 27 per cent this year, weighed down by disappointing February results and the overhang of unresolved merger talks with Spanish beauty giant Puig Brands SA. The company gave no additional details about those discussions on Friday, leaving the market to guess.
Silence on Puig
The proposed tie-up with Puig remains the most consequential unknown hanging over Estée Lauder. A deal with the Barcelona-based group, which owns brands including Carolina Herrera and Rabanne, would reshape the global luxury beauty landscape. But with nothing new to say and a turnaround still very much in progress, De La Faverie is asking investors to trust the process.
Three years of sales declines, 10,000 job cuts, and a merger that may or may not happen. At Estée Lauder, the overhaul has barely started.
