aespa's Karina Sparks Sellout for Gentle Monster 'Veggie' Eyewear Line

A vegetable farm has taken over a lobby in Seongsu, Seoul. On Tuesday, visitors walking into the HAUS NOWHERE store in Seongsu district were met with a wall of oversized character dolls shaped like broccoli, onions, eggplants, and turnips, sprouting from the floor as if pushing up through soil. Foreign tourists kept stopping mid-stride to gasp and pull out their phones for photos.

The scene is the pop-up store opened by Gentle Monster, the eyewear brand run by IICOMBINED, to launch its 10-piece "Veggie Collection." The line is the brand's take on "farm girl core," a global lifestyle trend built around pastoral farm imagery and a nature-leaning sensibility. Gentle Monster pairs that mood with its signature artificial, futuristic aesthetic. The collection borrows the organic shapes and colors of various vegetables and reworks them into foldable eyewear.

The flagship piece, Toffee 02, sets an irregular curved frame inspired by bell peppers against clear, green, and pink tinted lenses. Radi 02 combines a round metal frame with clear, yellow, and brown tints. Small details across the frames, drawn from vegetable stems and leaves, add a playful note. Designs pull from tomatoes, bell peppers, and other produce. One frame features a tomato-stem motif on the temple arm. Another is shaped after a bell pepper. A pair of sunglasses takes its cue from tree branches. Every piece is built with a folding hinge structure, and the frames are lighter than the brand's previous models to play up portability.

Radi 02, worn by aespa's Karina in the campaign video, drew major attention even before its official release and sold out entirely. The brand says the model went out of stock as soon as preorders opened last month.

"We expressed a new kind of beauty through the contrast between a pastoral mood inspired by the shapes and colors of vegetables and an artificial aesthetic," a Gentle Monster representative said. "By adding a folding structure, the collection has both design completeness and portability."

The pop-up leans hard into the brand's world-building. Plush-textured giant vegetable character dolls anchor the space, and tomato-shaped objects, a recurring Gentle Monster motif, sit throughout. Together they make the room feel like a walk through a farm. The kinetic objects and surreal staging the brand is known for collide with the traditional subject of a farm to produce a look that is hard to place.

Palm-sized "Veggiemon" dolls sit on the display tables. An interactive photo booth lets visitors composite their own face with a Veggiemon character to make a one-of-one character card. Customers who buy from the Veggie Collection receive a dedicated pouch designed to hold the folding frames. The brand is also giving away Veggiemon keyrings modeled after the 10 vegetable characters on a first-come, first-served basis, adding a collectible layer to the concept.

To mark the launch of the Veggie Collection, Gentle Monster plans to roll out special pop-up spaces in Shanghai and Beijing, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Thailand, following the Seoul locations in Seongsu and Dosan.