Designer Jeans Get 'Made in North Korea' Stamp

LONDON (Dec. 7) -- Over the past 60 years, the West has tried every trick in the foreign policy playbook -- from sanctions to multiparty talks -- to force open North Korea's brutal and reclusive regime. None has succeeded. Now a Swedish clothing startup is hoping jeans will finally help end the country's self-imposed isolation.

On Monday, Stockholm's Noko Jeans began selling the first-ever range of designer denim stamped with the label "Made in North Korea." Don't expect a great choice of colors, though. As Kim Jong Il wasn't willing to let his subjects work on blue denim -- the symbol of his nemesis, capitalist America -- the jeans are only available in black. However, that communist concession doesn't mean these are pants for the proletariat: Each pair costs about $220, more than two years' salary for the average North Korean.

Those subsistence-level wages have attracted a growing number of cost-cutting European and Asian companies in recent years, from textile operations to software developers. But the entrepreneurs behind Noko -- Jakob Ohlsson, 23, Tor Rauden Källstigen, 24, and Jacob Åström, 25 -- stress that they didn't head to North Korea for cheap labor. "This is about bringing new positive ideas to North Korea, such as corporate social responsibility, because the country is not only politically isolated, it is also mentally isolated," says Ohlsson, who freely admits that the regime often treats its citizens terribly. "Increased contacts could give the country a positive push."

However, some human rights campaigners say Noko's founders are naive for thinking they can bring about change in this vicious dictatorship. "The project may be well motivated, but it is extremely misguided," says Chuck Downs, executive director of the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. "The only thing it accomplishes is giving some sort of coolness to a totalitarian regime that violates the human rights of its people."

The trio first made contact with North Korean officials in mid-2007, after discovering a state-run Web site about outsourcing production to the country. After a lot of pestering by e-mail, they were finally granted permission to visit Pyongyang in 2008 and began to scope out suitable manufacturing sites. "It was very important for us to find out if the working conditions were acceptable," Rauden Källstigen says.

Then last summer, the trio headed back to the country for 10 days to supervise production of their limited run of 1,100 pants, and check that workers' rights were being respected. "The conditions in our factory were good, and better than some Chinese factories that work with huge international brands," Ohlsson says. But, he adds, "we don't know what conditions were like in other factories."

Downs says that no matter how closely the trio were involved in the production process, they wouldn't have seen the whole picture. "What they saw is probably not what they got," he says. "There have been well-documented instances where aid distributed by the World Food Program to ordinary people has been seized by the military as soon as U.N. inspectors leave the scene." He believes that the money paid to the factory would "have been almost completely diverted to the regime itself. The idea of a trickle-down effect happening in North Korea is a really misguided notion."

"We tried to do everything we can," Ohlsson says. "But even when you're working with a country like a China, it's difficult to control the final pay that the workers receive."

It's not only human rights campaigners who have doubts about Noko's denim. Last week, Swedish department store PUB pulled out of a deal to sell the jeans. "This is a question about a political issue that PUB doesn't want to be associated with," company spokesman Rene Stephansen told The Associated Press. Ohlsson says he understands why the company wants to avoid controversy, but believes the store is going after an easy target. "If they did it as part of a larger initiative to remove every product produced in dictatorships, such as Burma or China, that would be better."

Noko's founders are still unsure whether they'll be able to convince fashionistas to buy their divisive denim. So far the company -- which the trio run in their spare time, as they all have full-time jobs -- hasn't made a dime. "But if we make some revenue," Rauden Källstigen says, "we will make sure it gets back to the right people in North Korea."

Unfortunately, they won't be able to send their new North Korean friends any denim to say thank you. Jeans have been outlawed in the country for years.