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Entertainment

What to Wear in North Korea

Fingers crossed that 2012 will be the year capri pants finally reach Pyongyang. But we're not holding our breath.
Jamie Clifton
London, GB

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, vibing hard at Pyongyang Men's Fashion Week

In 2004, the late Kim Jong-il's North Korean state government put out the snappily titled TV show, Let's Trim Our Hair in Accordance with the Socialist Lifestyle, which outlined how citizens should dress if they didn't want to be despicable human beings and sub-standard socialists. A kind of lighthearted take on Joan Rivers's genre-defining Fashion Police, if you will. The show mainly consists of a film crew shaming various men because their hair slightly covers their ears–a BIG fashion no-no–before displaying their address and workplace on screen, because, duh, they're never going to bloody learn unless the whole country knows where they live.

Of course, this was almost a decade ago, but judging from the outfits and hair going on in the recent nationwide audition for North Korea's most bummed-out socialist, the proletariat still don't appear to have gone through their counterculture revolution quite yet. Fingers and toes crossed that 2012 will be the year capri pants finally reach Pyongyang. All we can do is dream, and keep checking what's on trend through a pair of binoculars from the demilitarized zone. For now, though, here's a guide on how to dress if you want to look like the hippest cat in the land of the free.

Read more about North Korea's fashion at VICEStyle.com