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.
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