by Ada Maria Francesca Romeo
With over one million Instagram followers, MLMA has transformed grotesque beauty, digital manipulation, and internet culture into a signature aesthetic. Here’s why H&M chose her as the creative force behind its latest installation in Seoul.
She made wavy eyebrows a global beauty trend, turned body distortion into an art form, and built an online universe where the grotesque meets the hilarious. This surrealist figure is MLMA (Me Love Me A Lot), the South Korean artist, rapper, fashion designer, and internet humorist whose unmistakable aesthetic has earned her more than one million Instagram followers.
Born and raised in Seoul in a working-class family, MLMA has described growing up in a strict household. Creativity became her escape, leading her to build imaginary worlds through experimental makeup, digital edits, and unconventional creations, including dolls made from toilet paper rolls. What began as a personal form of expression would eventually become the foundation of her artistic practice.
Rather than following a traditional academic path, MLMA’s career emerged through social media. In 2014, she left her position as a designer at MIXXMIX, a South Korean youth fashion brand, to pursue independent creative projects. Her breakthrough came in 2017, when her signature wavy eyebrows went viral, inspiring one of the internet’s biggest beauty trends and even becoming a Snapchat filter.
In 2018, her surreal visual language found a place within the fashion world during Paris Fashion Week. The imagery of Gucci’s now-iconic runway show where models carried hyper-realistic replicas of their own heads perfectly echoed the themes that define MLMA’s work: distorted bodies, doubles, and an uncanny sense of humor that blurs the line between beauty and discomfort.
In 2020, she became the face of one of the most unexpected collaborations in recent fashion history: KFC x Crocs. The campaign featured platform Crocs covered in the fast-food chain’s signature fried chicken print, resulting in a project that perfectly embodied MLMA’s playful, ironic, and unapologetically bizarre creative vision.
Today, MLMA is the co-founder and lead designer of Skoot, a fashion label that combines her original artwork with anime-inspired graphics, streetwear influences, and pop culture references. The brand has attracted a global following, with supporters including Billie Eilish, Rosalía, BTS, and Jackson Wang.
Through intricate Photoshop edits, body distortions, and surreal visual storytelling, MLMA continues to push the boundaries of digital art. Her work constantly shifts between the unsettling and the humorous, proving that originality can still thrive in an oversaturated visual landscape. It is this unique ability to surprise, provoke, and entertain that has made her one of South Korea’s most distinctive creative voices (and the artist behind H&M‘s latest installation in Seoul).