From 'delinquent' to fashionista: Designer Kang Ji-hyun tells stories of North Korean defectors through style

[NEIGHBORS FROM THE NORTH]

North Korean refugees face unimaginable peril to reach freedom, but their tribulations hardly end with their escape. Cultural differences often limit opportunities to earn a living in South Korea. In this series, the Korea JoongAng Daily meets defectors who have found their niche, exploring how their experiences and backgrounds in the North have influenced their work. — Ed.

Fashion has long been second nature to Kang Ji-hyun, founder and CEO of the fashion brand Istory. In the eyes of North Korea, however, she was a rebel — or in their words, a “yellow delinquent.”

A yellow delinquent is associated with the “yellow dust of capitalism,” a phrase North Koreans use to condemn culture that goes against socialist values, including South Korean or Western influences.

Kang was labeled a deviant because of how the 36-year-old defector dressed while living in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, an industrial city known for steel and fiber production. The city is a “fashion hub,” Kang said, as it is home to Sunam Market, reportedly North Korea’s largest officially sanctioned marketplace, and a major center for wholesale clothing.

Kang would wear denim, hoodies and velour tracksuits in a country known for its modest fashion, largely focused on garments like tailored suits and knee-length skirts. 

Neighbors would scold Kang, yet they seemed envious. They would ask her where she got her outfits and even ask her to resell garments to them. 

“I think I’ve just always had a good sense of style,” Kang told the Korea JoongAng Daily in an interview at her office in Jung District, central Seoul, on June 10. “For me, it’s like intuition.”

But crackdowns were inevitable. When jeans came under tighter scrutiny around 2008, authorities confiscated her denim pants, sometimes even cutting them up with scissors to prevent her from ever wearing them again. Kang’s father, who was an official for the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, had to endure criticism from colleagues during meetings, urging that his daughter dress “normally.”

Roughly two decades later, Kang leads Istory in South Korea. At the heart of the brand are patch designs sewn onto T-shirts and crewnecks, each inspired by interviews with fellow North Korean defectors and visualized as wearable art.

How ripped jeans led to freedom 

Anyone who knows Kang will know the story of how she fell for fashion. It began with ripped jeans on North Korea’s sacred Mount Paektu.

When she was 15, Kang and her family were on a pilgrimage to Mount Paektu, the country's tallest mountain and a site often linked to the ruling Kim dynasty in regime propaganda. From afar, she spotted someone she initially thought was homeless, only to realize it was simply a foreign tourist wearing distressed denim.

“Since it was 20 years ago, and intentionally wearing something that’s ripped was unheard of in North Korea, my thought process naturally leaned in that direction — that he was a beggar,” Kang said. “My dad was dumbfounded, too, but he told me that it was probably a style choice. I vaguely remember becoming more interested in fashion after that.” 

For a couple of years afterward, however, life in North Korea got in the way of chasing any fashion-related interests. She briefly studied accounting at university and worked as a librarian, neither of which kept her interest for very long. 

An opportunity to study in Harbin, China, thanks to a North Korean friend’s connections, rekindled her interest in fashion. During her one-semester enrollment at a university there, some of her South Korean friends suggested she defect. She was immediately intrigued after learning that the southern neighbor was a “better environment to study fashion.” 

“I never had a grandiose scheme to defect to South Korea,” Kang said. “But I always fantasized about living there because I loved their dramas.” 

When Kang secretly watched South Korean dramas in the North, one of her favorites was the SBS television romance series “Lovers in Paris” (2004). 

“The fashion was extraordinary,” she said, citing the spaghetti strap dresses and bolero jackets donned by actor Kim Jung-eun, the protagonist of the drama. Kang was also head over heels in love with the male lead actor Park Shin-yang. 

“He used to be my ideal type for a really long time,” Kang said, gushing. 

Leaving home

Kang didn’t tell her family about her plan to defect to South Korea. 

Because she made her decision while in China, she didn’t even get to say goodbye.

“If I did, they would have been completely against it anyway,” Kang said. “After I arrived in South Korea, my mother did find me via a broker, and we’ve been in contact a few times. My parents were devastated. I’ve tried to persuade them to escape, too, but they outright refused.” 

Kang remembers her escape in fragments because of severe fatigue at the time. From Kunming, China, a city near the border with Laos, she climbed a mountain at night for what felt like hours and learned that she had reached Laos. After that, her memory was “lost until 2 p.m.,” when she boarded a four-wheel drive and a boat along the Mekong River until she reached Thailand and went through asylum proceedings. She stayed in Thailand for over two months, where she was kept confined in a “prison-like space with about 200 more women.” 

Kang’s “very cold” journey dragged out for six months until November 2009 because the number of North Korean defectors entering the South surged that year. As a result, each defector had to wait their turn to be interviewed by the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s top spy agency.

According to data released by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, 2,914 defectors came to South Korea that year, 2,252 of them women. The total plummeted to 236 in 2024. 

Women make up the majority of North Korean refugees because they tend to be better exposed to new ways of thinking, including defection. As most men hold state-assigned jobs but earn little or no money, women are the primary breadwinners through running businesses at jangmadang (local markets in North Korea), which Kang’s grandmother used to describe as places that had “everything but cat horns.” 

“It’s so hard to make ends meet in North Korea that I’ve heard of some people being sold to human traffickers in China — willingly!”

Where trends are copied, not created

In recent years, South Korea has seen its fair share of emerging domestic fashion brands, including Wooyoungmi, Songzio, Matin Kim, Andersson Bell and Gentle Monster. 

It’s a different reality in the North. The concept of a “fashion designer” is more like an “imitator” of existing designs. It’s why there are virtually no reports of a distinctive North Korean fashion brand. 

Tailors produce knockoff luxury designer clothing, such as Burberry or Chanel. Ri Sol-ju, the wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, is widely seen as a fashion icon and is reportedly the inspiration behind the fashion of Pyongyang's elites. 

Other trends in the North are mainly based on what celebrities wear on television and in film, which generally spread from the upper class to merchants and businesspeople and, finally, to the general public.

Trends come in from overseas, particularly Russia and China, but also from Japan, especially through Chongjin Port, which is located on the East Sea and handles cargo from Japan and northeast China.

Stitching together stories

Istory’s colorful, unique designs stem from Kang’s personal identity crisis.

Fresh from a perilous six-month journey to South Korea, 19-year-old Kang enrolled in a two-year college to study fashion. Wanting to expand her education, she later entered Hanyang University, majoring in fashion design, clothing and textiles. 

After graduating in August 2016, she spent two years preparing to continue her studies abroad. She recalls this time as one of the most difficult times of her life, as she also had to juggle a part-time job to put food on the table. 

She ultimately gave up after getting a job at a company that organizes the biannual Seoul Fashion Week, where she was involved in model casting, stage production and recruiting international buyers. 

“It was such a busy time for me; I worked day and night, even on the weekends,” Kang said. “I did learn so much, though. It made me realize how much I wanted to launch my own fashion brand.”

Kang launched Istory in August 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. She had just been in an entrepreneurship study group, which consisted of South Koreans, defectors and foreigners.

“There were some South Korean members who were noticeably biased against those from North Korea,” Kang said. “I didn’t know whose side to take because both had valid opinions. Some of the defectors were admittedly a bit frustrating to deal with because they didn’t fit in well, but that didn’t mean that every North Korean was like that. What should have been a personal dispute soon became a rivalry between the two nations. I began wondering, ‘What am I?’” 

Kang wanted to create a platform using art and fashion where she could naturally speak on behalf of North Korean defectors and, at the same time, improve their reputation.

When asked why her designs emphasize the patch shape, Kang replied that she didn’t want to “overwhelm” the overall garment nor make the stories appear “too weighty” for whoever wears it.

An example of Kang’s patch design is the story of Park Yu-sung, a defector who works as a video content creator and dreams of becoming a film director. Kang portrayed a director’s chair overlooking a brilliant red sunset along a cliff, symbolizing Park’s hometown in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province, which was famous for its abundance of rocks.

In the case of North Korean rights advocate Kang Chun-hyok, who is a rapper and painter, Kang Ji-hyun illustrated a vibrantly colored Korean Peninsula in a puzzle design. It alluded to the dynamic nature of his work, while representing efforts to connect the divided nations.

Navigating new waves

For Kang, creativity is not confined to clothing. When she’s not interviewing defectors and designing new patches, she paints her own stories and mentors aspiring entrepreneurs.

As an artist, she goes under the alias Dagyeol, which means “many waves.”

“Even the tiniest waterdrops are capable of forming one enormous, powerful wave when they come together,” she said. “I thought the same for North Korean defectors, in hopes that their stories would bring about a great impact.” 

She is considering rebranding Istory to showcase her own stories through her paintings. One work, of course, features Mount Paektu.

Last year, Kang founded Ifabric, an AI-powered fabric sourcing platform that connects fashion industry buyers and suppliers.

Kang is currently pursuing her master’s degree in entrepreneurship at Korea University. She also mentors other North Korean defectors who dream of launching their own startups one day. 

“There are so many defectors with brilliant ideas but struggle to develop a clear business direction or prepare presentation materials,” Kang said, explaining that they often lack access to startup training programs.

“What we need — myself included — is realistic advice from those with firsthand experience in the business world,” she said. “It’s one of my many goals to continue to support startups established by North Korean defectors.”

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [[email protected]]