That CORTIS flavor. It’s an expression that started popping up one day in fashion posts on social media. As BIGHIT MUSIC boy group CORTIS’ distinctive fashion choices made more and more of an impression on people, the number of videos and articles breaking down the group’s outfits or recreating their individual looks began to multiply. Interestingly, the discourse doesn’t stop at specific pieces CORTIS has personally worn. Items the group has never even touched are being called CORTIS-coded, too. Fast-fashion jeans, vintage sporty outerwear, statement-piece accessories, even slackercore and Y2K vibes—all of it gets swept up under the CORTIS umbrella. It’s hard to pin it down to a single definition, but somewhere along the way, CORTIS “flavor” became synonymous with vintage fashion, fit, and accessories that scream sprezzatura with an unexpected edge. The name of one boy group turned into shorthand for an entire aesthetic overnight.

The styling throughout CORTIS’ promotions for their album “GREENGREEN,” released this past spring, played a major role in cementing the group’s unique fashion sense in the public eye. When performing their single “REDRED” live, the group wore a wide range of jersey and track pants combinations from various sports brands—think deep cuts from luxury labels released over 20 years ago, brand-name items that are no longer sold in Korea, or sneaker lines that are hardly up to date by 2026 standards. Rather than sticking to the brands and styles at their trendy peak, CORTIS works to keep vintage pieces in the mix. What’s more, they put together outfits that mix completely different categories of clothing together, like leather vests with piqué shirts or safari jackets with workout tops. They’ll even pair Nike and Adidas together, a combination that’s often seen as a fashion faux pas. In this sense, CORTIS’ stage outfits seem to speak a completely different language from typical K-pop styling, which tends to lean into notable brands, chase the latest trends, and aim for total visual unity. Designer Ko Taeyong summed up the group’s fashion philosophy perfectly when he broke it down on his YouTube channel: “I don’t care about style or gender—bring me anything and I’ll make it work.”

In the song “FaSHioN” off their debut album, CORTIS namechecks two Seoul neighborhoods known for their vintage clothing stores: “Dongmyo, Wassup / Hongdae, Wassup.” The boys have been hitting up the two hotspots since their trainee days, when their interest in fashion first took hold, and they even partnered with secondhand fashion app FruitsFamily after debuting to publish their wish lists. On Weverse LIVE, they have your typical, everyday chats about clothes, like what they put on that day, how they scored a certain piece, and what they’re into lately. And from some point, the boys’ individual tastes and preferences became a way of understanding who each of them is. Early on, for instance, CORTIS became almost synonymous with sagging pants. But that look was never the whole story. Each of them was already working on their own personal style, each with its own distinctive features. JUHOON, for one, often gravitates toward slim-fit pieces plus clothes and fabrics that emphasize his proportions. KEONHO aims for a sporty look with a vintage feel, favoring beanies and ball caps. MARTIN’s leaned into fits that show off his frame and experiments with bold statement pieces. There’s a story that made the rounds online about how, if you searched SEONGHYEON’s real name on a certain vintage fashion site, one of his go-to polos would show up in the results. And more recently, when the other members were asked to describe JAMES’ style, they immediately pinpointed his “rock band t-shirts” that he customizes, explaining how “he cuts” and “crops his t-shirts” all the time. That kind of instant, specific recall says everything about how clearly the CORTIS members understand their own and each other’s style, and how deliberately each of them has developed and individualized it over time.

According to the visual branding team, “the members of CORTIS don’t really have any preconceptions—they seem to see clothes as an instinctive language and just take them at face value as what they are—clothing.” In July, JUHOON beamed on Weverse LIVE about a great studded leather bracelet he bought on ABLY, a fashion and lifestyle app aimed mainly at women in their teens and 20s. Of course, the boys have a well-documented interest in archive fashion from high-end brands and rare collaborations—within their spending limits—but there’s more to their fashion sense than that. In a video titled “3am haul,” for example, MARTIN and the others chat as they unbox WHO DECIDES WAR x Jordan collab sneakers. What grabs their attention isn’t the rarity or the price, but how to coordinate with the unusually textured laces. Moments later, when MARTIN pulls out a vintage leather jacket from women’s brand MANGO, SEONGHYEON chimes in to say how he likes to “buy women’s clothing a lot too.” Rather than dwell on the fact that the jacket is womenswear, they focus on how perfectly it fits MARTIN, with one of them noting that that tight style is “how you’re supposed to wear it,” after which they agree it looks even better worn unzipped.

For CORTIS, clothes are just clothes. “The group members seem to feel out the mood of a piece on instinct rather than overthinking it,” the visual branding team says. “They express that attitude naturally, in their own way.” In other words, clothes are a space for CORTIS to explore and discover their own appeal, and a tool for expressing who they are. In a “Weverse Magazine” interview, KEONHO once described their song “ACAI” by comparing it to an acai bowl directly, explaining how the base matters more to the flavor than any of the toppings. That analogy isn’t far off from how CORTIS approaches clothes, either. That idea of staying focused on the essentials while still being open to experimenting with what goes overtop naturally works its way into their fashion sense. Their willingness to take risks echoes something JAMES said in a “Teen Vogue” video: “You gotta be uncomfortable to kind of level up your style.”

Last fall, just a month after their debut, CORTIS turned heads with their unconventional take on hanbok. In the “Chuseok FaSHioN” video they posted, the group moves frantically between their living room and the room where they keep all their clothes, scissors in hand, cutting up clothes and trading accessory recommendations back and forth. MARTIN layers a blazer over his hanbok. KEONHO pairs his with a beret. JUHOON cuts the arms off his hanbok top to make it sleeveless, while SEONGHYEON ties the goreum on the front like a belt. JAMES goes all in on applying the sagging pants trend to his hanbok. Semi-oversized tops, cropped at the bottom, deep armholes. Baggy pants, high waist, roomy through the leg, tapered at the ankle. CORTIS’ consistently judgment-free approach to every piece of clothing leads them toward unexpected choices no generation before them ever could have imagined. “I think the most important thing is that the group’s free-spirited attitude toward fashion comes through in the content,” a representative for BIGHIT MUSIC’s Artist Content 3 team, which oversees CORTIS’ YouTube channel, said about the direction behind the group’s fashion videos. The same goes for the video they put out during this year’s FIFA World Cup all about dressing in red to cheer on Korea. Throughout the video, the boys continuously deck themselves out with sunglasses, vests, scarves, and more. They don’t hesitate to stack red on top of other shades of red or mix multiple contrasting colors together. Even if something looks a little off at first, they just try it on, check it out in the mirror, and throw out opinions as they keep adding on.

“The CORTIS members sometimes pick out or style their own outfits,” the visual branding team explained. “They’ll check out what each other’s wearing and talk it through—whether it feels like them, whether it’s something they’d actually buy and wear in real life.” During the “GREENGREEN” album art shoot, the team “developed everything through conversations with the group from the planning stages all the way through fitting.” “GREENGREEN” famously features the green Gilmajunggyo Bridge on its cover, which the group used to pass on their way to and from practice as trainees. The wall in the background of the BRIDGE version of the album photos is the very same wall they’d “rather hop” in the lyrics to “What You Want.” The boys’ input had a direct influence on the wardrobe choices for the shoot, too. The visual branding team shared additional behind-the-scenes details, explaining how “MARTIN wanted to pay homage to Kurt Cobain’s style and came up with the idea to sew patches onto his pants, and KEONHO ended up using a bag he actually takes around with him in real life.” By working in the group’s real personalities and ideas wherever possible, and working plenty of their everyday looks into hair and makeup, the album photos ended up as an authentic portrait of the CORTIS members. It’s the same instinct that led them to take the acai bowls they used to eat all the time in LA and turn them into a song, or weave their actual routine into lines like “pull up to the studio with our pants low, let’s go.”

BIGHIT MUSIC’s Marketing 3 team explained that the CORTIS members tend to have a lot of direct input not just on their outfits but on their Weverse and Instagram posts as well. “They’re proactive when it comes to expressing themselves visually, immediately coming up with interesting compositional ideas and visual direction on set.” Their Instagram backs that up. CORTIS’ account is full of shots where they photograph each other reflected in sunglasses, photos that play with distorted proportions, and extreme close-ups of details like fingernails and hats. CORTIS doesn’t stop at simply wearing clothes—they’re constantly experimenting with how to visually present themselves and putting the results out into the world. As the marketing team puts it, the group “treats fashion and visuals as an important artistic tool for expressing who they are and has an active hand in shaping it.”

In an interview with “Weverse Magazine,” MARTIN said he views fashion as showing how people “go through their day-to-day life.” In his eyes, people choose their clothes based on who they’re seeing, what they’re doing together, where they’re going, or else based on whatever they’re into these days, the kind of life they want, and what they value. Whether vintage or new, Temu finds or high-end labels, menswear or womenswear, CORTIS moves freely between all of it. They get to pick out what they want, put outfits together on their terms, and wear things their way. For CORTIS, clothes are a way of life. Still, a life that includes haggling over prices on a secondhand fashion app one day and getting invited to Paris Fashion Week the next isn’t one that’s easy to capture in a few words. In fact, the group actively avoids labels. When the older generation started to call them the YOUNGCREATORCREW, the boys instead poked fun at it by turning it into the “young c’ c’” meme. The 2020s are a time when you can find archival footage from every decade on YouTube, encounter clothing at every price point under the sun through different media, and witness the coexistence of countless different personal styles and “-core” aesthetics. For the young c’ c’ generation, who entered their teen years to that backdrop, the old ways of sorting people into neat categories aren’t even something they have to consciously break from—it never applied to them to begin with.

In “REDRED,” CORTIS uses green to symbolize what they’re after and red for things they steer clear of. The fashion the song puts out into the world plays on that same message. It doesn’t matter who’s worn a given piece before or how. You might think it looks a little weird, but they simply “couldn’t care less.” That swagger, that attitude that says who cares what other people think, and just following your instincts, is the true core of CORTIS’ fashion sense. Which brings us back to the main point, which is that it’s that very attitude that’s likely behind why the group’s name ultimately became synonymous with an entire style. The CORTIS look doesn’t take wearing any particular product or fit—it’s all about adopting an attitude where you feel comfortable enough to color outside the lines. Like JUHOON confidently proclaimed to veteran entertainer Kim Dae-hee on GgonDaehee, “anyone can be a CORTIS.”