North Korea hates K-culture but loves blatantly copying Seoul’s trends as craze grows

Even as North Korea spent 2025 pushing a political strategy centred on ignoring South Korea, the country simultaneously copied South Korean products, designs and cultural content – from food packaging to football fan zones – revealing what analysts describe as a contradictory yet calculated pattern of imitation. While Pyongyang continues to warn against the inflow of South Korean culture, it has selectively adopted popular elements and repurposed them as its own through what observers call...