Renacts 2023 Gentlemens Club Yearbook campaign — Seoul Trad featured thumbnail

Seoul Trad: The Essential 2023 Yearbook Beyond Take Ivy

April 24, 2026 SEOUL TRAD

Seoul Trad began with a single question: what would we put in the archive if we stopped borrowing someone else’s? Three years ago, we made a campaign that borrowed a legend’s name. Take Ivy — the 1965 Japanese photo book that documented American Ivy style at its canonical peak — was the obvious reference, and we paid tribute to it the way any young Seoul menswear brand would: by photographing our own version of it. It was the correct first move. It was also the last time we would do it.

This post is about the campaign that came next: the 2023 Renacts Gentlemens Club Yearbook — the first campaign shot under what we now call the Seoul Trad premise. It was our first campaign shot under a new premise — that we would no longer borrow someone else’s legend. We would begin recording our own Seoul Trad archive, under our own name. The concept was the American college yearbook, and the subjects were the friends, older brothers, and younger brothers who actually wear Renacts every day. This is the visual record of that shoot, and the argument behind it.

Renacts 2023 Yearbook Cover — Gentlemens Club group portrait, American college yearbook concept for Seoul Trad campaign — The cover shot. Fourteen members of the Renacts Gentlemens Club, photographed against a vintage yearbook-studio backdrop with “Renacts School — Yearbook Edition” printed across the top. Not models. Actual members of the community that wears Renacts.

One Year In: The Seoul Trad Archive Problem

This campaign was photographed in 2023, roughly one year into Renacts’ operation — which means it predates the Seoul Trad vocabulary we use today. From four years’ distance in 2026, it is easy to forget how provisional the brand still felt at that point. We had a product line — blazers, OCBDs, knitwear, chinos — that was coherent, and a small but real customer base. But one question followed the brand everywhere.

Ivy and prep are niche, referential genres. Every serious brand in this space is measured against decades of visual archive — the Take Ivy photographs, the Brooks Brothers catalogs, the 1960s Dartmouth yearbooks, the countless editorial shoots that defined the language. Renacts, one year in, had products but not yet a body of its own imagery. It was a fair criticism and we could not ignore it.

Seoul Trad campaign — Renacts Gentlemens Club Yearbook playful group pose, American high school yearbook tradition — A playful variation on the cover — the kind of unplanned moment that only happens when the subjects actually know each other. This distinction was the premise the whole campaign was built on.

So we spent a long time on one question: what archive should we actually be building? The answer, after months of internal discussion, turned out to be about the wrong noun. We had been thinking about the archive as a collection of clothes. But when you look at the Ivy and prep source material — the Take Ivy photos, the Yale yearbook pages, the Brooks Brothers ads — the archive was never about clothes. It was about people. About specific communities of young men who wore specific things together, photographed together, remembered together.

Seoul Trad’s Archive: People, Not Clothes

That reframe is the reframe that produced Seoul Trad. If the archive we needed to build was about people, then we could not hire fashion models. Models wear clothes they don’t own, in locations they don’t live in, for a brand they don’t belong to. That’s the opposite of what we needed.

Instead we turned to the people who had been wearing Renacts since the beginning — the older brothers, friends, and younger brothers who had shown up at the store, worn the pieces to real events, and helped the brand feel like more than a catalog. We gave that group a name: the Gentlemens Club. And the campaign was about them.

Seoul Trad archive — Renacts Gentlemens Club 2023 Yearbook full team portrait, fifteen members arranged in three rows — Fifteen Gentlemens Club members arranged in three rows, yearbook-style. Every face in this photograph is someone who was already wearing Renacts before they were asked to stand in front of a camera for the brand.

The American College Yearbook Concept

Having fixed the subject — real people, not models — we then needed a visual framework. The one we chose was the American college yearbook of the 1950s and 60s. It was the obvious choice for several reasons, some of them conscious and some of them instinctive.

Consciously: the American college yearbook is the single most important document of Ivy style on record. The entire Ivy aesthetic canon was first photographed, year after year, in the yearbook format — rows of young men in the same sack jackets, ties, and oxford shirts, filed away in a school library because graduating seniors wanted to remember each other. Take Ivy is, in a real sense, a yearbook made by outsiders. The Yale Class of 1965 yearbook is a yearbook made by insiders. Both belong to the same tradition.

Instinctively: the yearbook format is the clearest possible expression of the community-over-clothes thesis — the foundation the Seoul Trad project would be built on. A yearbook is not a fashion catalog. It is a document of a specific group of people at a specific moment, and the clothes are incidental to that document. That’s exactly what Seoul Trad needed.

The Covers

Seoul Trad Yearbook cover variation — Renacts Gentlemens Club in blazers and ties, American college aesthetic backdrop — The alternate cover composition — more members, looser arrangement, same premise. A yearbook cover by a school that doesn’t exist, for a club that very much does.

Every yearbook opens with a group cover shot. We did three variations. The studio backdrop was fabricated to match the distinctive painted-cloth texture of 1950s American school portrait backdrops. The “Renacts School — Yearbook Edition” banner was set in a period-appropriate serif. The members were directed to stand how they actually stand with each other, not how a model would pose. That last direction is what every image in the set is built on.

The Classmates

Traditional yearbooks organize students by class or by activity. We organized the Gentlemens Club by what they wore on the day of the shoot.

Seoul Trad Yearbook T-Shirt Classmates — Renacts American-collegiate graphic tees and chinos — T-Shirt Classmates. Members photographed in the American Traditional Club and TRAD graphic tees, the two T-shirt styles that carried the most weight in the 2023 lineup.

Seoul Trad Yearbook Shirt Classmates — Renacts oxford shirts with ties and shorts — Shirt Classmates. Renacts oxford shirts with knit and repp ties, worn over tailored shorts. A yearbook page that reads the way a group of Yale 1962 seniors would have read — because the vocabulary is the same.

Seoul Trad Yearbook Shorts Classmates — Renacts tailored shorts and blazers — Shorts Classmates. Renacts tailored shorts with blazers — a combination the American yearbook format encouraged us to commit to without apology.

Seoul Trad Yearbook T-Shirt Classmates alternative group shot — Renacts graphic tees and shorts final arrangement — T-Shirt Classmates, alternative arrangement. The yearbook format lets the same group reconfigure repeatedly across a publication — which is also how an actual community photographs itself over time.

The Individual Profile Pages

The most direct translation of the yearbook format was the individual profile page. Each Gentlemens Club member got a full spread — a “Hello, I am ___” tag, a close-up portrait, a full-body standing shot, and the specific Renacts piece they had chosen to feature. These are the pages that, to us, are the real point of the Seoul Trad campaign: each page is simultaneously a product shot and a member portrait, and neither reading is more correct than the other.

Profile page: Renacts TRAD T-shirt, khaki trousers. Full-body portrait on the right, photographic ID card on the left — yearbook convention reproduced exactly.

Profile page: ATC (American Traditional Club) T-shirt, tailored shorts. The graphic T-shirt takes on a different meaning when a specific person is wearing it.

Profile page: TRAD T-shirt in navy, cream chinos. A single product reads differently depending on who is standing inside it.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt, navy tote, chinos. The tote was a piece the members had started carrying unprompted — that’s how we knew it belonged in the line.

Profile page: TRAD T-shirt in white, tailored shorts, crew socks, loafers. Five separate Renacts pieces, each designed to work independently.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt, chinos, cap. The same yearbook template applied to a different member, different product combination.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt in navy, cream trousers, shoulder bag. The ID-card composition lets each member have the same structural dignity as every other.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt, tailored shorts, standing profile shot. Repetition of a format is the yearbook’s whole design strategy.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt in orange, tailored shorts, crew socks. A brighter colorway of the same core graphic that anchored several other profiles.

Profile page: ATC T-shirt in orange, tailored shorts, canvas tote. Identical template; entirely different energy from the person inside it.

Profile page: Renacts Shirt Collections feature — oxford shirt, knit tie, tailored shorts, loafers. The shirt-centric version of the yearbook spread template.

The Product Spreads

Between the individual profiles, the yearbook structure allows for “feature pages” — dedicated spreads on specific products or categories. We used these to let the clothes breathe on their own terms.

Seoul Trad Yearbook product spread — Renacts Shorts and Shirts feature with dark shorts and pink oxford — “Shorts and Shirts” feature spread — RVCT Signature Crest Supima Cotton Shirt in pink with GDMA Cotton Tailored Two-Tuck Shorts. Yearbook product-page format with hand-labeled call-outs.

Seoul Trad Yearbook product spread — Renacts Shorts and Shirts with khaki shorts and white oxford, tie and tote — “Shorts and Shirts” spread, second variant — white RVCT Supima shirt, navy tie, GDMA khaki shorts, canvas tote. Same template, different color register.

Renacts Yearbook product spread — Shorts and Shirts feature detail with dark shorts and pink oxford standing portrait — “Shorts and Shirts” spread detail — the full-body portrait pair with product call-outs. The yearbook format treats garments the way it treats classmates: as members of a group, not as isolated stars.

The Closing Spreads

Renacts Yearbook closing spread — Seoul Trad campaign final editorial image — The closing spread. A yearbook closes with a group portrait the way a book closes with a last page — not as summary, but as a marker that this particular year happened.

What the Seoul Trad Campaign Actually Started

Renacts is now four years old. Looking back from 2026, the 2023 Yearbook campaign is the moment the brand stopped being one that referenced Ivy style and became one that produced its own — the first chapter of what we now call Seoul Trad. Not by inventing new garments — the OCBD and the sack jacket and the chinos are still the same shapes they’ve always been — but by treating the community that wears them as the primary subject.

The Seoul Trad campaigns that followed — the New Trad Anorak shoot, the sack suit Legacy photograph we documented in our Yale Ivy style post — all trace back to what this Yearbook campaign decided. Seoul Trad is not a new set of clothes. It is the same Ivy language, spoken by a specific community, in a specific city, starting from one photographed afternoon in 2023.

Take Ivy was the reference that made the Seoul Trad project possible. After the Yearbook, we no longer needed to point at Take Ivy to explain what we were doing. We had started writing the Seoul Trad record under our own name. Three years later, in 2026, the rest of this site is the continuation of what this campaign set in motion.

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