Karina Was There: Inside the Vegetable Farm That Popped Up in the Heart of Seongsu

A giant vegetable farm has taken over a lobby in Seoul's Seongsu district. The scene is the latest pop-up from Gentle Monster, the eyewear brand run by IICOMBINED, built around its new 10-piece "Veggie Collection."

Inside the Housenowhere store on June 4, oversized plush characters shaped like broccoli, onions, eggplants, and turnips appear to sprout from the soil in a large indoor field. Foreign tourists passing by stopped in their tracks, pulling out their phones to take photos.

The Veggie Collection reworks "farm girl core," a global lifestyle trend rooted in pastoral imagery and a nature-friendly mood, through Gentle Monster's signature artificial and futuristic aesthetic. The frames borrow the organic shapes and colors of vegetables, then translate them into a folding structure designed for portability.

The lead style, Toffee 02, has an irregular curved frame that echoes a bell pepper, paired with tinted lenses in clear, green, and pink. Rady 02 pairs a round metal frame with clear, yellow, and brown tint options. Small design details across the collection nod to vegetable stems and leaves. One pair features a tomato-stem pattern on the temples. Another frame is modeled directly on a bell pepper. A sunglasses style takes cues from tree branches. Every piece folds down at the temples and frame, and the collection is lighter than the brand's existing lines to make the glasses easier to carry.

Rady 02 has drawn the most attention. Karina of the K-pop girl group aespa wore the style in a brand campaign, and pre-orders sold out last month before the official release. A Gentle Monster representative said the collection captures "a new kind of beauty through the contrast between a pastoral mood inspired by the shapes and colors of vegetables and an artificial aesthetic." The rep added that the folding structure gives the line "both design completeness and portability."

The pop-up leans hard into Gentle Monster's trademark worldbuilding. Large vegetable characters made of soft yarn sit alongside tomato-shaped objects placed throughout the space, giving visitors the feeling of walking through a farm. The brand's kinetic objects and surreal set design, familiar from past pop-ups, meet the traditional imagery of a farm to create something unusual.

Palm-sized Veggiemon dolls sit on the display tables. Visitors can use an interactive photo booth that blends their face with one of the Veggiemon characters to make a one-of-a-kind character card. Customers who buy from the Veggie Collection receive a pouch designed to hold the folding eyewear. The brand is also giving away Veggiemon keychains shaped like 10 different vegetable characters on a first-come, first-served basis.

Following the Seoul launches in Seongsu and Dosan, Gentle Monster plans to bring the Veggie Collection pop-up to Shanghai and Beijing in China, Tokyo in Japan, Los Angeles in the U.S., and Bangkok in Thailand.