Kim Jong Un’s daughter increasingly appears in photographs wearing luxury brands from Western designers banned in North Korea for being considered reactionary and anti-socialist.
However, more than a gesture of adolescent rebellion, Kim Ju Ae’s fashion choices—leather clothing, a rooster-style hairstyle and even a transparent blouse—suggest that she is groomed to succeed the supreme leader.
Ju Ae was reportedly born in 2013 and officially debuted at the age of nine in November 2022, walking with her father in front of a towering ICBM. With her long hair tied up, black pants and a white padded jacket, she already showed a carefully constructed image.
Since then, her hairstyle has become increasingly sophisticated and her attire increasingly elegant and refined.
In 2020, North Korea enacted the Rejection of Reactionary Ideology and Culture Act, which blocks “foreign culture.”
But in 2023, the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency published a video of Ju Ae walking with her father in front of an intercontinental ballistic missile, this time wearing a black quilted jacket that was later identified as from the luxury French fashion house Christian Dior, valued at about $1,900.
The following year, after Ju Ae wore a transparent blouse to the completion ceremony of the Vanguard Street residential area in the capital, Pyongyang, a video was released warning that her hairstyle and outfit were “anti-socialist and non-socialist phenomena that blur the image of the socialist system and undermine the regime, objectives that must be eradicated,” an informant in North Hamgyong Province told Radio Free Asia.
Now, it seems, some want to emulate Ju Ae’s sophisticated style.
“Times have changed and there has been a major generational change,” Joung Eunlee, head of the North Korea Research Department at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told the BBC Korean service.
“Since 2010, the number of workers migrating to earn foreign currency has increased significantly. Nearly 2,000 North Korean workers remained in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. And when they returned to Pyongyang (the capital), they brought Chinese culture with them,” he explained.
“In the past, luxury goods were limited to Japanese brands brought by the Zainichi (Koreans who in the 1960s and 1970s were persuaded, often with false promises, to emigrate to North Korea on so-called repatriation ships, after their parents had moved to Japan – sometimes for forced labor – during the Japanese rule of the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945). But now it seems that (a great variety of) North Koreans know a wide range of foreign brands,” said the expert.
“Since the bags and clothes (despite being smuggled into North Korea) are too expensive, it seems that they start by trying perfumes,” he added.
But Ju Ae is far from the first fashion icon in her family.
“It seems that Ju Ae wears the same suit-style clothes as her mother, Ri Sol Ju. As a way to hide her age. A young woman who sets trends in a sophisticated Western-style outfit? That is almost impossible in North Korea,” Cheong Seong-chang, deputy director of the Sejong Institute, explained to the BBC’s Korean service.
“By wearing Western designer clothes, Ju Ae and Ri Sol Ju demonstrate a ‘differentiation strategy’: that their social position is fundamentally different from that of ordinary residents. The reason why Ju Ae and Ri Sol Ju can do these things without worrying about their privileged status,” he added.
Ju Ae’s good taste doesn’t just come from her mother.
“Although jeans are banned in North Korea as a Western fashion item, Kim Jong Un has been shown wearing them,” said Professor Lee Woo-young of the University of North Korean Studies.
“No matter how much they ban foreign culture and even enact laws, North Korea is a place where there is nothing that the supreme leader cannot do,” he noted.
Ju Ae has also worn leather jackets on several occasions, which indicates, according to Cheong, that the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea is doing its job: to differentiate her from ordinary citizens.
“Wearing high-quality leather clothing means having a special status,” he concluded.
“Leather clothing is not very common among North Korean residents. Luxury brands, leather jackets and fur coats are prized garments that ordinary North Koreans cannot wear,” he added.
The “replication of the image”; That is, imitating the fashion of previous generations, is another tool that successive leaders have used to stay in power, including Ju Ae’s father, who, during the first years of his rule, sought to ensure his legitimacy by imitating his grandfather Kim Il Sung’s hat and coat.
“North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department played a critical role in orchestrating a series of processes that, in essence, transferred respect for Kim Il Sung (founder and leader of North Korea for more than forty-five years) to Kim Jong Un,” Cheong said.
“It is said that North Koreans were surprised by the first appearance of Kim Jong Un. But the reason why South Korean experts were also surprised was his close resemblance to the young Kim Il Sung,” he explained.
“The limitations that the young Kim Jong Un faced as successor, such as his lack of experience and his age, were compensated only by his resemblance to Kim Il Sung,” he concluded.
“There came a point where rumors circulated among North Koreans that Kim Il Sung had been reincarnated,” he said.
“In North Korea, Kim Il Sung is practically a deity,” recalled Professor Chung Young-tae of South Korea’s Dongyang University. And that deification has been passed down from generation to generation to Kim Jong Un and, now, to Ju Ae.
Ju Ae is already known as “Princess” in North Korea, and this name refers to the divine lineage of her ancestors.
“Senior North Korean officials used the title Princess for (Kim Jong Un’s sister) Kim Yo Jong, until some time before Kim Ju Ae was born,” explained Ryu Hyun-woo, North Korea’s former acting ambassador to Kuwait, who defected to South Korea.
“This is because Kim Yo Jong was called Princess when (her father and Kim Il Sung’s son) Kim Jong Il was still alive,” he said.
Edited by Hyunjung Kim, Andrew Webb and Stephen Hawkes
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