Expanding Overseas, Becoming Multinational, and Moving Up the Value Chain: Three Waves of Globalization in the Korean Apparel Industry

South Korea has had a central role in post-war global garment production. Initially positioned as an offshore processing location for Japan in the 1960s, Korea’s garment sector has emerged as one of the leading suppliers in the global garment industry in the ensuing decades. Tightly integrated to buyer-driven global value chains (GVCs) linking East Asian producers to Western consumers, leading Korean garment vendors have become multinational, first-tier suppliers (FTSs) for US and European brands and retailers. As a result of intensive efforts to go overseas to reduce production costs, these FTSs now have strong footprints across Asia and Central America. Despite their significant presence in garment GVCs, little research has been done on the history and current state of the Korean garment sector in GVCs, particularly leading FTSs. This chapter aims to fill this research gap, first, by revisiting the history of the Korean garment industry from a GVC perspective, starting from its initial industrial built-up and subsequent export growth in the 1960s–1980s to a massive migration of production to lower-cost locations in China and South/Southeast Asia throughout the 1990s. Based on the statistics on international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), this chapter then examines the changing geographic and organizational features of Korean FTSs’ production network over the last two decades, a period interspersed with the Asian economic crisis, the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA), the rise of “fast fashion,” and the global financial crisis. The findings are discussed in the context of the shifting dynamics of governance in post-crisis garment GVCs and the challenges the Korean FTSs confront in the rapidly changing apparel GVCs in terms of market, technology, and regulation.