Paroma

Origin

‘Paroma’ comes from the ‘wardrobe’ television commercial for the Korean furniture brand Paroma, aired in 1999. Actress Song Yun-ah flings open a wardrobe door and shouts ‘Paroma!’, whereupon a great many women each throw open their own wardrobes and shout ‘Paroma!’ in turn. With almost no product description and no pricing, only the repeated act of shouting the brand name, it left an impression strong enough that Koreans say the sound plays in your head even with the volume off. The footage survives on YouTube as ‘Paroma Furniture CF – Wardrobe Edition’.

The staging was not original. The core idea — many women throwing doors open and shouting a brand name — was lifted from the 1990 commercial for Chanel’s men’s fragrance Égoïste. Directed by Jean-Paul Goude, that film is famous for thirty-six women in evening dress on thirty-six hotel balconies, nine to a floor, throwing open their shutters and crying ‘Égoïste!’ To shoot a summer scene in winter, the crew built a hotel facade in a desert near Rio de Janeiro. The Paroma ad merely swapped balconies for wardrobe doors, and accusations of plagiarism followed.

Spread

The commercial behaved like a meme while it was still on air. Schoolchildren took to climbing into their family wardrobes and shouting ‘Paroma’ as they pushed the doors open, and there was even so-called ‘Paroma terrorism’, in which passengers shouted ‘Paroma!’ as subway doors opened. It is a textbook case from the era before internet communities, when a single televised clip became an offline catchphrase overnight.

Its staying power is documented. In a February 2015 survey by the mobile research firm Open Survey, Paroma’s wardrobe commercial took 5.3% of the vote for the most memorable Korean television advert of the 1990s — fifteen years after it stopped airing, which suggests it settled into a generation’s shared memory rather than fading with the trend. It has since been pulled back out whenever variety shows or YouTube channels revisit vintage advertising, which is how audiences too young to have seen it live came to know it.

Usage

• Shouting a meaningless ‘Paroma!’ in time with opening any door, lid or hatch
• As the standard example when discussing the exaggerated, faintly bizarre style of 1990s Korean advertising
• Describing a situation in which several people chant one word in sequence, round-robin style

Because the line carries no meaning of its own, its usage is almost free of context. Anything that opens can take a ‘Paroma’, and that very emptiness is part of why the meme has lasted.

Sources

• YouTube, ‘[Paroma Furniture CF – Wardrobe Edition] Song Yun-ah, 1999’ — the original 1999 commercial
• Namuwiki, ‘Paroma Furniture’ — contents of the wardrobe commercial, its borrowing from the Chanel Égoïste ad, the February 2015 Open Survey figure of 5.3%, and the ‘Paroma play’ and ‘Paroma terrorism’ fads of the time
• YouTube, CHANEL official, ‘EGOISTE, the 1990 Film: Le Carlton’ — the 1990 Chanel Égoïste commercial the Paroma ad borrowed from
• Wikipedia, ‘Égoïste’ — 1990 release, perfumer Jacques Polge, and the thirty-six balconies and thirty-six women of Goude’s film