This is the story of how a luxury foreign brand captured an entire generation of young Korean women by being expensive, starting from the most unlikely place: the cramped print shops of 1980s Euljiro.

From King Gojong's first sip in 1896 to today's Instagram café empires, Korea transformed into the planet's third-largest coffee market—driven by female consumers whose choices reshaped entire neighborhoods and sparked a national reckoning about gender, class, and what it means to be modern.