Alan Titchmarsh presumably did not expect to see his programme Garden Secrets, filmed in 2010, air on North Korean state television this week. He would perhaps have been even more surprised to see the network blur out his blue jeans for viewers.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, under the rule of Kim Jong Il the anti-jeans rhetoric heightened

Why did the higher ups in North Korea decide that the public needed protecting from Titchmarsh’s denim? The reason has nothing to do with diplomatic relations between the hermit and United Kingdom. Nor is Pyongyang particularly interested in the topiary and 17th century gardens featured in the episode.

Instead, Titchmarsh’s North Korean star turn is a convenient if extraordinary vehicle for the country to make a political statement and denounce its enemies. In Pyongyang’s eyes, the equation is simple: jeans mean capitalism, and the spread of jeans worldwide equals North Korea’s worst nightmare, the triumph of Western capitalism over socialism and authoritarian rule.

This is not an isolated incident. North Korea has long decried the wearing of jeans and other forms of western clothing since the global popularisation of denim during the late Cold War.

Throughout this period, North Korea’s first leader, Kim Il Sung, wanted to enact his vision of the ‘socialist paradise’ of North Korea, offering his people, as well as the Third World, what he naively deemed to be a viable and superior alternative to US-led capitalism. In the mid-to-late 1990s, under the rule of his son, Kim Jong Il – the North Korean leader during the initial broadcast of Garden Secrets – the anti-jeans rhetoric heightened. Jeans were seen as a manifestation of ‘American imperialism’, antithetical to the North Korean-style of socialism expounded by successive leaders of the Kim regime.

If, for the past three decades, jeans have been scorned as the clothing of the capitalist enemy – namely the United States – why broadcast a British television series over a decade after it first aired? It certainly is unusual. Foreign shows are rarely broadcast on North Korean television, which is heavily controlled by the state. Although a harmless British lifestyle documentary offers a stark and more mundane contrast to North Korea’s typical propaganda denouncing the United States as an ‘imperialistic’ power, it still feeds into North Korea’s anti-western narrative.

The recent anti-jeans diatribe forms part of Kim Jong Un’s broader clampdown on so-called ‘reactionary’ ideology, which accelerated after the country closed its borders in January 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The border has still not fully re-opened.

The North Korean leader has particularly targeted younger members of society, calling on North Korean youth to sport hairstyles and attire in line with a socialist lifestyle. In 2021, the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Workers’ party of Korea, made clear that North Koreans should resist the ‘invasion of capitalistic lifestyles’ which were fundamentally incongruous with those espoused by socialism. Jeans – skinny, ripped, or otherwise – mullets, dyed hair, and piercings were fundamentally out of the question.

Kim’s sartorial suppression has more than a hint of hypocrisy, given how he spent several of his formative years undergoing a western education in Switzerland, wearing the latest Nike trainers, and obsessing over basketball. But those were his youthful days: in the present day, regime survival is paramount.

North Korea hasn’t just clamped down on jeans or anti-socialist hairstyles. At the end of 2020, the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament, approved several laws tightening control over society, two of which were the ‘Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture’ and ‘Law on Mobile Telecommunications’. Freedom of movement between provinces is forbidden, and the number of defections from North Korea has fallen under Kim Jong Un’s rule.

The picture is clear but bleak. North Korea is not just preparing itself for war against the United States and South Korea, as Kim Jong Un warned earlier in the year, when he threatened to use nuclear weapons. There is also another war to fight, namely the war against information, ideas, and capitalist ideology. For the North Korean regime, a pair of blue jeans is no innocent item of clothing. It symbolises an act of resistance against the totalitarian state of North Korea and offers a potential glimpse of what a post-authoritarian society could look like. The ruling regime is determined to nip this kind of thinking firmly in the bud. Not only does it want to ensure people do not leave; it also wants to stop any new ideas from seeping in.

The Kim regime is well known for failing to practise what it preaches. Whilst we may not see the Supreme Leader in a pair of Levi jeans any time soon, these sartorial edicts will not apply to his nearest and dearest. Kim Jong Un’s wife, Ri Sol-ju, has gained notoriety for her love of flamboyant hairstyles and western fashion. His sharp-tongued sister, Kim Yo Jong, has been spotted carrying a Dior handbag, whilst his acerbic Foreign Minister, Choe Son-hui, prefers ostrich-leather Gucci. This is despite UN sanctions forbidding the export of luxury goods into North Korea.

We do not know which British television programme North Korea will broadcast next, but as the German novelist, Thomas Mann, once said: ‘everything is politics.’ In North Korea, everything is indeed political – even a humble pair of jeans.