Two thousand years ago, a 16 year old princess from Ayodhya, accompanied by her brother, sailed from India for Korea. We only know her by her Korean name, Huh Wang-Ock. There she wed King Kim Suro, founder of the ancient Korean kingdom of Karack. The King himself received her upon her arrival, and later built a temple at the place where they had first met. Her story is narrated in the ancient Korean history books, “Samkuksaki” and “Samkukyusa”.

In February, 2000, Kimhae Mayor Song Eun-Bok led a delegation to Ayodhya. The delegation proposed to develop Ayodhya as a sister city of Kimhae and set up a memorial for Queen Huh. Ayodhya is the modern Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh. It was the capital of the kingdom of Lord Ram, the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

The legend of the Indian princess is narrated in Samguk Yusa, a Korean text written by a monk, Iryon (1206 AD-1289 AD). It is set in the Kaya kingdom in the first century CE. It says that the area, in the south central Korean peninsula, was first ruled by nine elders, but there was no king. One day, a voice spoke from heaven at a place called Kuji (means ‘delicious turtle’ in Korean). A few hundred people gathered there, along with three elders. The voice instructed them to go to the top of the mountain, dig up some earth, dance and sing a song, now known as Kujiga. They did as instructed and a plum-coloured cord descended from heaven.

At the end of the cord was a gold chest and when they opened it, they discovered six golden orbs. The elders brought the chest home and the next day they opened it to discover that the orbs had transformed into a baby boy.

The boy grew quickly (a sure sign of a hero) and reached a height of nine feet. When the moon waxed to its fullest that month, the boy – who was now called Kim Suro (Kim means gold) – came to the throne of the land that was named Kaya. After two years he built his own palace and ruled from there. When the nine elders encouraged the king to take a bride he refused, saying that heaven had sent him to be king and heaven would take care of his marriage as well.

Cut to India, where Huh Hwang-ok was a princess in ‘Ayuta’ (Ayodhya?). In Iryon’s text, the princess says that she was 16 years old when she reached Kaya, that her family name was Huh and her name, Hwang-ok (yellow jade in Korean).

The princess narrates the circumstances leading to her marriage to King Suro thus: “In May this year, my father and mother said, ‘We had a dream last night, in which we saw a God who said, I have sent down Suro to be king of Kaya. Suro is a holy man, and is not yet married. So send your daughter to become his queen’. Then he ascended to heaven. My daughter, bid farewell to your parents and go’.”

Other accounts of the text, however, say that it was Hwang-ok who got the dream.

Anyway, Huh is said to have arrived in Kaya, along with her brother Po-ok, on a ship with a red sail and red flag, bearing treasure and gifts. When she was presented to the king, she told him of the dream and the king knew immediately that this was heaven’s chosen bride for him.

They were married in 49 CE and the queen was greatly loved by all her subjects. She is said to have lived to the grand old age of 156! The couple had 10 sons and two daughters. Two of the sons were named Huh after their mother’s family name and the rest were called Kims, after King Kim Suro.

The Kaya kingdom’s influence is still felt in modern-day South Korea. Kimhae Kims and Kimhae Huhs trace their origins to this ancient kingdom and Korea’s current President Kim Dae Jung and Prime Minister Jong Pil Kim are Kimhae Kims. Therein lies the Indian Queen’s importance in Korea eyes – she is revered as the progenitor of two powerful clans which have survived to this day.

Queen Huh’s tomb still stands in the Gyeongsang (South) province of Korea.
Also bearing testimony to the Queen’s Indian roots is the Pisa Stone Pagoda in the same province. The stones, with exotic engravings and red patterns are believed to have originated from India, brought by Princess Huh in her ship. The pagoda is also called Chimpungtap (Wind Calming Pagoda) because it is reputed to have a mysterious power to calm the stormy sea. Another myth surrounding Huh’s voyage is that, along with the many treasures she carried in the ship, was a single plant of tea. Which is how tea came into Korea.
Today, the historians say, Queen Huh’s descendants number more than six-million, including the South Korean president – Kim Dae Jung.
Though it could all just be a myth, since no information has been found about Queen Huh in Indian history, but it does sound like a magical journey of a brave princess away from home. Anyhow it was overwhelming to know about the legend of the Indian princess from Ayodhya.

(the images used are of a Korean TV drama on the life of King Suro and his exotic Indian queen)

The student manifestations of the late 1960s and early 1970s were emblematic of the social, political and economic upheaval of the time; women, students, trade unionists and the French were all angry. There was solidarity among socialists of all ages who sought revolution through action.

In 1965, a new fashion magazine, comprising 5,000-word articles by such luminaries as Susan Sontag laid out in fields of clean white space and uninterrupted fashion spreads by Helmut Newton and others, was launched in London. Its small and influential staff wanted a revolution of their own. Under the matriarchal figurehead of the fashion editor Molly Parkin, her secretary, a young Caroline Baker, became the first of a new breed of culturally aware aesthetes we now call stylists.

“Nova magazine was very much the first street fashion magazine. i-D didn’t exist, and the term ‘street’ had not come into being,” says Baker, now the long-serving and respected fashion director of The Mail on Sunday’s lifestyle supplement, You. “Understand that, back in the 1970s, fashion was driven by Paris and couture and design, and I was part of a group of working-class girls who were just totally anti label. Through my pages at Nova I was having a wonderful time, being a bit of a feminist and a rebel, saying, ‘I don’t want to wear heels and lipstick!’ We don’t want to be objects for men, but we do want to wear men’s clothing and we want to have men’s jobs.”

This rejection of the fashion establishment and the fusty commandments of Paris were unheard of. The ruling editors of Vogue and Harper’s & Queen were products of a different age and generally elected to their seat through their place in society.

Nova was everything that Vogue was not…

Having become Nova’s fashion editor, the twentysomething Baker eschewed the clothes worn by others her age and went on “ban the bomb” marches in an old parka influenced by the washed-out camo prints and khaki greens she’d seen in the hit American TV series MASH. “I did a shoot for Nova with the photographer Hans Feurer using all this army-surplus gear I’d found and was wearing at the time. Then, lo and behold, a year later, I go to the Paris shows and Kenzo, everybody, had put military surplus on the catwalk. You just realised then the power of the media.”

As the 1970s came around, psychedelic design was everywhere. Swirls of colour and acid brights, paisley prints and a new wave of modern fabrications that were cheap to produce enabled more people to wear disposable and readily available fashions. Miners’ sons in Doncaster wore girly polyester shirts, tight bell-bottoms and spoon-toe stacks. Baker took this as a cue to blur the demarcation lines of gender dressing even further.

“I started putting girls in men’s clothes. Now, Yves Saint Laurent had just produced the tuxedo, but who could afford Yves Saint Laurent? So I went to Moss Brothers, where they had a great second-hand department. It didn’t have to fit, just put a gold belt around it and then wear high heels.”

She put models in the crisp white garb of a waiter and piled on diamonds. She was the first to put her girls in legwarmers, something she started doing herself because she was always so cold; she experimented with surgeons’ robes, somehow splicing them into her shoots. She then turned clothes inside out, an act of sedition that Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo would adopt years later. She also experimented with Moroccan clothes and various African modes of dressing.

“You were just trying to be a bit shocking at Nova, break the rules; that was what Nova magazine was basically about. And I had an editor who encouraged that.”

But Baker’s magical shoots weren’t the only thing that reflected the socio-political flux; her life did: “You know, when I think of the 1950s, which I was born into, my mother and father would not go out the door without a hat. My father always had hats and cuff links. Women always wore lipstick when they went to the hairdresser’s. So there was so much for us to rebel against. It was wonderful.

“I was about 25. I got a job in fashion, purely because I ran around looking like Twiggy and I caught the attention of the editor – I was Molly Parkin’s secretary at the time, I was all legs. And suddenly I found myself immersed in fashion. Little by little, I began to live what I was preaching. I had a five-point haircut, which changed my life; women like Twiggy and Mary Quant were our idols. I went into the salon with a beehive and came out with a five-point bob.”

Sadly, in 1975, Nova folded. And punk began…

Baker began to work closely with Vivienne Westwood on the hugely influential Nostalgia of Mud collection. Westwood was intrigued by Baker and her openness, her disparate sense of style. Baker began to rag her hair and pioneered the white girl Rasta look of the early 1980s, influencing the likes of Boy George and designer Sue Clowes. Later still, she worked on the Katharine Hamnett shows with clothes that embodied a new kind of London-centric cool.

Her influence on successful stylists such as 10’s Sophia Neophitou, Katy England, Carine Roitfeld and Katie Grand is incalculable. Baker is the progenitor. The first to style shows, to collaborate with designers and the first to really influence the catwalks. Her incredible work with the photographer Oliviero Toscani for Benetton in the 1980s is the stuff of styling legend.

“We did pictures of black babies amongst white ones. We did Arabs with Jews. I would style them all in this way. By the time Toscani got into women giving birth, he didn’t really need a stylist!”

The role of the stylist as we know it really began to change in the 1990s, argues Baker, when the stylist became terribly important. Or when the stylist became as important as the designer. Or when the stylist became the designer. “You had somebody like Tom Ford, who was a stylist, coming in to take over [at Gucci]. That kind of thing began to happen with people who possessed a fantastic fashion sense. They have something that actually relates to the way the public out there is thinking and the stuff then sells.”

And when a stylist becomes too involved, or rather a celebrity replaces a designer and the whole creative process is bastardised, Baker gets angry. She wrote this to me in an email:

“I am deeply hurt by the media obsession in what is a very creative world. Fashion design is an art form. Designers who make it to the top are the most creative minds working in this field, the use of cloth/pattern/shape is a skill you own as a designer and are able to use to produce clothing that inspires and changes the way we the public perceive clothing and what we want to wear and identify with. And for a celebrity to come along with a fashion collection, and the public to lap it up, is deeply upsetting, depressing and disgusting. All they do is take their favourite pieces from their wardrobe and get it copied, copied, copied. It goes with the general dumbing down of the populace.  Lemming-like, they all rush head first into this bottomless pit of stupidity and unfortunately do not expire, rather they rush after the next celeb on the horizon.”

The last word goes to our hero about the march of the working woman in the 1980s and her feelings about today’s slovenly approach to dress: “That was a huge thing, going to work. We went through that whole period where you had to dress up and you had to fit in with men to work hard, to be smart like them, wear suiting. Now things are horribly casual and people are wearing jeans to work. People actually wear flipflops to work… I think we need Dior back.”

by Richard Gray

an excerpt from an amazing read, thought i should share