Harmony in Motion - Collection 09 is Here!
Unveiling our latest collection: a whimsical, sustainable summer capsule tributing artist Seund Ja Rhee
If you've been following along, you already know that Collection 09 started with a woman. Specifically, with one of the five artists we spotlighted this Women's History Month — Seund Ja Rhee (이성자), a pioneering Korean artist who left her homeland for Paris in the 1950s with almost nothing, and built a body of work we couldn’t look away from!
It was her color that did it first. Bold, saturated, structured — Rhee didn't use color as decoration. She used it as architecture. Her later Yin and Yang series, built on the tension and resolution of opposites, felt so aligned with what iRi has always been about that it became the backbone of this collection. The custom-developed recycled knit fabrics, the palette, the lookbook — all of it was designed in direct conversation with her archival canvases.
The result is five styles, all centered on our patented Dancing Heels silhouette — offered as a chic mule and an elevated platform heel, handcrafted in South Korea. Each carries a pseudonym drawn from Rhee's artwork titles: ELI, MONA, MUNI, and ELVA. Lemon yellow, sunbeam orange, ocean blue, and structured black tech-mesh. The iRi team also handmade, hand-dyed, and painted every prop in the lookbook — shapes and colors pulled straight from Rhee's paintings.
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Another thing we're proud of: Collection 09 is our another collection built entirely without petroleum-based synthetic leathers. The uppers are constructed from KrPET — recycled plastic bottles sourced locally in South Korea. A sustainability milestone that felt right to reach with this particular collection.
And one last thing — completely unplanned, but too good not to mention. "Harmony" in English sounds remarkably close to 할머니 (hal-mo-nee), the Korean word for grandmother. Given that iRi started with Janet's grandmother in mind, we'll take that as a sign 💛
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