We all have that one friend with immaculate, maddeningly chic taste—someone who knows exactly where to eat, where to shop, and where to travel. The internet’s answer to that friend is Suea: a Korean American creative director whose curated snapshots of her life in Seoul, travels across Europe and Asia, vintage fit pics, and food diaries have earned her 52,000 followers on Instagram, with people in the comments begging her to reveal the names of her favorite restaurants, shops, and hotels.
Declaring 2026 as the year of “less gatekeeping,” she finally acquiesced and launched her Substack, From, Suea, which compiles invaluable travel guides (Tokyo, Okinawa, Taipei), recipes, and personal dispatches on topics close to her heart, like hair care, K-Dramas, and her one true love: shopping. Now, with the launch of her new womenswear brand, Memory NYC, audiences can delve even further into her cute, nostalgic visual world. “I have a horrible memory, but I always remember what I was wearing,” she says of the meaning behind the brand’s name.
After migrating from Seoul to Montana as a young child, Suea first fell in love with fashion as a teenager growing up in New Jersey, begging her parents to take her to the mall to visit the Abercrombie & Fitch store after church on Sundays. “I love a strong retail experience, and that’s what initially drew me to that whole world,” she says, recalling the store’s intoxicating smell (which was pumped with Fierce, the brand’s signature cologne), taxidermy moose heads, and highly covetable logoed shopping bags plastered with sun-drenched imagery shot by Bruce Weber. A career in fashion followed. After double majoring in international relations and French at UCLA—which she chose purely in order to study abroad in Paris for a year—Suea moved to New York to do a merchandising internship at Dover Street Market New York. She later worked at Opening Ceremony for five years across buying, marketing, and content, until it shuttered in 2020.
Feeling fatigued by the fashion world, Suea later took a corporate job in the pandemic as a creative producer at Instagram. It was then that she began posting her striking, surreal DIY food concoctions on Instagram: cherubic angels made out of olive oil, airbrushed teddy bear cakes, and viral edible sculptures inspired by modernist furniture (most famously, a miniature Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair made out of onigiri and a Le Corbusier LC2 armchair made from butter). After brands came calling, Suea quit her corporate job and Suea’s Dinner Service was born. She began working as a food artist full-time, creating content for brands, catering for fashion week events, and working as a food stylist for T Magazine. “I was in the first generation of creative food content creators on Instagram, and it was blowing up,” she recalls. “It was super lucrative, and it was my dream job.”
But just like fashion, the world of Instagrammable food proved tiring too. “Girls at these fashion week events were not eating the food, especially when it looked that cute,” she recalls. “Also, it became dark when I started thinking constantly about my food in this very aesthetic way. It was like a new kind of eating disorder, because I would think everything I ate had to be cute so I could post it.” After briefly partnering with a friend on a brick-and-mortar cafe in Brooklyn, in 2024, she decided to move back to Seoul after being offered a job at a beauty brand.
Suea then began thinking about launching her own brand after discovering a gauzy white fabric dotted with multicolored stars during a trip to Tokyo. When she returned home to Seoul with three yards of the fabric, she tracked down a tailoring ajumma (the Korean word for ‘auntie’) and the Tokyo skirt was born: a cute low-rise style with a pintuck waist inspired by beloved vintage skirts from Suea’s own wardrobe.
