South Korean women have resorted to a cool new fashion trend, by wearing "refrigerator pants" to beat the heat.
Like much of Northeast Asia, South Korea is enduring a massive heat wave-the country nearly had a blackout Monday with power demand reaching record heights-and South Koreans have been scrambling to keep cool as best they can.
Unlike, say, the past 20 fashion trends that all South Koreans embraced and discarded before anyone else knew they were a thing (neon skinny jeans, winged sneakers, lightning-bolt-shaped plastic earrings, platform Converses), the latest hottest fashion trend is based on the "cooling" functionality.
The result - Thin, light and wildly patterned "refrigerator pants," which are what all the girls in Seoul and Busan are wearing this summer, CNN reported.
Made from wrinkle-free polyester fabrics, refrigerator pants are flying off the shelves at online and offline shopping malls as the heat surges on.
Seung-won Lee, a representative for Coco Marlene, South Korea's largest online pants and leggings store said that they started seeing the trend last summer, and this year too, around 70 percent of their sales are coming from these refrigerator pants.
A third of the store's sales, which Lee says total between 5-6 million dollars each year, can be attributed to the refrigerator pants, which led to the store ranking number one on the shopping section of Naver, Korea's largest online portal.