A Swedish department store on Saturday canceled what was to be the sale of the “first ever” brand of jeans made in North Korea, the Swedish company behind the communist-made dark denims said.
“Apparently PUB [department store] has censored our exhibition/store by shutting it down and ‘confiscating’ the jeans because of the ‘working conditions in North Korea,’” Jakob Ohlsson of the company Noko Jeans said in an e-mail. “At first I thought it was a joke, but everything has been removed from the store.”
Ohlsson, along with Jacob Aastroem and Tor Rauden Kaellstigen — all under the age of 25 and with no previous experience in business or fashion — started Noko Jeans in 2007, prompted by a desire to contact isolationist North Korea.
PHOTO: EPA
Their designer jeans were to be sold starting on Saturday at Aplace, a boutique that is a tenant of the trendy PUB department store in central Stockholm.
NO SALES
“A half-hour before opening, we got a call from the head of the department store and he explained to me ... that PUB cannot sell the Noko Jeans,” Kalle Tollmar, the founder and chief executive of Aplace said.
“The explanation I got was that [the store’s management] had taken the decision ... that PUB is not the right place, or platform, for this kind of political discussion,” he said, confirming his store was hoping to continue distribution of the controversial duds at another location.
The Noko Jeans sales space at PUB was deserted on Saturday, the jeans removed and a surrounding photo exhibition taken down by the department store’s security personnel.
“They have it in a locked room at PUB, but we have been promised to get everything back on Monday, it’s only for security reasons, they don’t want us to sell the jeans,” Tollmar said.
SALES MUSEUM
Noko Jeans referred to their sales space as a “museum, because our experiment is much more a story ... of how this happened, what happened and about some of the people we met and came to love in North Korea” than just a pair of jeans, Jacob Aastroem said.
“We think its really, really sad, because we back up Noko jeans by 100 percent,” Aplace’s head buyer Dan Jaget said from the store, adding his boutique had started selling the jeans online.
The “made in North Korea” designer denims have garnered much media attention and customers flocked to PUB on Saturday to get their hands on the jeans, which retail for around 1,500 Swedish kronor (US$226) a pair.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS