I’m all about the styling of Han Ga-in’s Moon Jae-in in this one.

The guys are standard suits and chaebol-wear, and everyone looks sharp, but it’s nothing to write home about. Moon Jae-in, on the other hand, I love. I’m not that interested in how the Hong family daughters are dressed because it looks like typical expensive-women wear, and that bores me.

The one winning thing about a good majority of Jae-in’s outfits is that her shoes give her rather girly get-ups a sharper, harder edge. She almost always wear badass biker boots, either with stacked heels or no heels at all. Everything else about her outfits are extremely girly — pastel blouses, slouchy button-downs — but once you look down at her shoes, the feeling completely changes.

I really like that the stylists use all kinds of shapes and proportions on Han Ga-in, all of which give her outfits different silhouettes. They don’t stick to one cut with her, whereas in cases like Moon Geun-young in Cinderella’s Sister, there were essentially two shapes: the blazer with pants look or the blazer with skirt look. It was all the same silhouette. With Han Ga-in, different cuts are used with different materials so that outfits alternate between a flowy, breezy shape for when she goes to work, and then tighter, more body-conscious shapes when she needs to dress up.

I do have two chief complaints, though.

First is Han Ga-in’s hair and makeup, both of which I hate. I dislike Han Ga-in’s haircut in general but the hairdresser is driving me bonkers with how h/she’s styling it. For the first four or five episodes, she just had blunt bangs and swept the rest of her hair in a pony-tail. After that, it’s been a steady side braid or a splat of side-swept bangs with a pony tail. The side-braid looks so greasy and her bangs bug the shit out of me because I hate really overly styled side-swept bangs. It doesn’t feel natural.

Her makeup artist also needs to work on something new. It’s not very obvious in the caps I provided, but Han Ga-in’s consistent look consists of eyeliner slightly winged out at the end. I usually enjoy this look a lot and use it on myself too, but my peeve is that the winged tip doesn’t follow the entire shape of her eye, and cuts off about a centimeter away from the end, which again, doesn’t look natural. As you can tell I have a thing about hair and makeup looking natural.

The second thing is not just a complaint about Bad Guy’s styling but styling in Korea in general. Maybe it just doesn’t seem to work that way with fashion, PR, and media in Korea, but I barely, if ever, see authentic brand name goods on dramas. In the US, if you’re going to have a character carry a bag, you actually reach out to the fashion PR firm and pull pieces. That’s how it works. But apparently, that’s not how it goes in Korea, and this is one thing that really bugs me.

I’m not one of those people who get preachy about the bootleg vs. authentic debate, but if you’re going to establish a certain look for a character, either pull authentic pieces for a loan, or just don’t have the character carry that piece at all, because people who do know fashion will know these things do not match with the character’s established background. I’ve already picked out Mulberry Alexa, Givenchy Pandora, Miu Miu Turnlock Satchel copies that Han Ga-in carry in the drama. I’m not so much an expert on the realness of those bags as much as I just know that Korea doesn’t operate with pulling from PR, so I know they’re not real.

Okay, that’s it! :)