Global pariah and C-tier fashion influencer Kim Jong-un is setting trends again, this time through force of law. The North Korean leader banned a range of garments, accessories, and hairstyles this week, Mirror UK reports, citing Yonhap News Agency. Skinny jeans, Dear Leader says, are out. As are mullets, piercings, and other signs of the “decadent” influence of capitalism.
First skinny-jean innovator Mike Amiri gives up on the style, and now Kim Jong-un: It’s been a tough year for slim denim. But if skinny jeans simply signify circa-2009 bad taste in the U.S., they represent a bigger political statement in North Korea. Skinny jeans have been a subject of controversy there in the past, where some in the government saw them as a form of class distinction—a big no-no in a totalitarian communist state. Jeans in general, skinny or otherwise, are a deeply American garment, and wearing them is taboo in Pyongyang. Which makes denim, naturally, a quietly subversive fashion statement for rebellious North Korean millennials.
Unsurprisingly, this isn’t the first fashion restriction of its kind in North Korea. Back in 2017, a Finnish journalist snapped some photos of the very specific list of hairstyles approved by the North Korean government: 15 for men, 15 for women. Mullets weren’t acceptable then, so I guess they’re extra unacceptable now. Alternate haircuts are apparently “non-socialist.” Who’s going to tell Kim that his approved haircuts are pretty on brand for big business–cheering Young Republicans, while the kids with mullets and dyed hair in Brooklyn hate capitalism? I don’t know, but I do know that you should watch this clip from a TV program the North Korean state produced in 2004, titled, I kid you not, Let’s Trim Our Hair in Accordance With the Socialist Lifestyle:
Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle.
Silly as this law might seem, bans like it have a long history—like, 2,000 years long. The Roman emperor Tiberius, for example, decreed that men couldn’t wear silk because it was too soft and only suitable for women. Things like this fall under the legal category of sumptuary law, which is basically any kind of law that seeks to restrict luxury or excess. All around the world, governments, autocratic or otherwise, have sought to ban everything from lace to purple clothes. The goal is usually to suppress rebellious or foreign ideas and aesthetics.
So why would Kim Jong-un do this now? I asked Ruthann Robson, a professor of law at CUNY and the author of Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy From Our Hairstyles to Our Shoes, what Kim Jong-un might have against skinny jeans and mullets.
“The desire to control dress and impose ‘uniformity’ is certainly common to despots of all types,” she wrote via email. “Often such regulations, laws, or policies are a type of social control with exemptions for the upper classes. So, for example, in Elizabethan England, Queen Elizabeth’s ban on furs and imported fabrics such as silks excluded the royal family.”
Robson also pointed out that there’s historical precedent for banning mullets—back in 1297, Parliament banned the culan, the mullet of the Middle Ages. She referred me to her book, where she wrote:
“Although it is expressed as degeneracy,” bad hair “is also about being ‘foreign,’ and a ruler attempting to forge nationalism through hairstyles,” she added.
So—Kim Jong-un is banning skinny jeans and mullets under the veil of degeneracy to promote homogeneity and nationalism. Checks out. For our part, GQ endorses piercings, advises caution with regard to mullets, and categorically condemns both skinny jeans and totalitarianism. Let us keep getting fits off in accordance with the decadent capitalist lifestyle.