Lol, I remember when they invented this story years ago. The origin was literally a guy on Twitter seeing a picture from North Korea of one of those boards with different hairstyles at the barber that you can reference and just assuming that those were the only hairstyles that the government allowed.

That somehow generated multiple years of insane made up stories around hairstyles in North Korea, like there were stories claiming it was either forbidden or mandatory for men to get Kim Jong Un’s signature cut, sometimes appearing in the same publication weeks apart.

For whatever reason they keep printing stories about North Korean haircuts, possibly becuase they are frivolous enough that they don’t get any serious pushback despite how obviously absurd they are. Unlike other all-timer fake North Korea stories like nuclear testing creating zombies or their whole soccer team getting executed because they lost the World Cup.