Fashion in Panem

How fashion in The Hunger Games universe is used as a tool for revolution and dissension.

Dec 20, 2023

It’s no secret to anyone that I am incredibly susceptible to fandom culture–it’s just who I am. And I was most definitely a victim of the 2010’s young adult dystopian empire. But truly, it all started for me with The Hunger Games. I read the series for the first time at the ripe age of ten, and it has stuck with me ever since. I was at the Thursday night premier of The Hunger Games movie in March of 2012. And years later I was at the first local showing for Mockingjay Pt. 2. I made and reblogged Katniss x Peeta edits on Tumblr and (spoiler alert) cried myself sick when Finnick died. Suffice to say, the release of the The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes film has officially completed my age regression to approximately 13 years old.

With the new film coming out, I took it upon myself to reread all of the books and rewatch all of the movies (for about the 15th time). And let me tell you, boy do they hold up. In fact, I think they were even better as an adult because I caught so much more of the social commentary and truly grappled with the immense influence this franchise had on my worldview from such a young age.

Being who I am, the element that stood out most to me was the way Suzanne Collins both subtly and overtly used fashion as a tool for displaying social and political revolution and dissent. So, let’s talk about it.

Fashion = Bad?

A common misconception of this series is that Collins’ stance on fashion boils down to Fashion = Bad. After all, the vapid, self serving, glutinous capital citizens are all about it. In the first book, we meet Effie Trinket, the District 12 escort for the Hunger Games. In our first impression of a capital citizen, Effie is described as, “fresh from the Capitol with her scary white grin, pinkish hair, and spring green suit.”1 In the movie, Effie is wearing stark white makeup and iridescent lipstick, giving her an alien quality. Of course, the Capital is meant to represent excessive consumerism and privilege run rampant. As Katniss and her loved ones starve and are put in the Lottery of Death, capital citizens take bets and watch the proceedings from the comfort of their couches. Fashion, and thus, caring about it = bad? Right

Well, no. As Katniss grows to know and care for people like Effie and her own prep team (who feature much more heavily in the books) she begins to view them not as cruel but childlike. Not apathetic but clueless. In fact, her prep team in the Catching Fire novel is inconsolable as they ready her for her second games. They care for Katniss deeply, albeit in their own way. She realizes that these people are victims of capital brainwashing themselves. Here, the audience begins to realize that Fashion ≠ Bad. What has actually happened in Panem is the government’s systemic usage of fashion and consumerism as a tool for placating and distracting their citizens. President Snow cannot control the Capital citizens with the threat of the Reaping, so he finds other ways to occupy their minds to prevent them from thinking too hard about their society. Fashion is actually an incredibly powerful tool, and Snow knows it.

Cinna the Stylist

In my opinion, one of the most disturbing elements of the Hunger Games as a concept was the way the tributes would be pampered, stuffed, and paraded around the Capital before the games began. Children who have only ever known poverty are suddenly given luxury, excess, and celebrity before having it ripped away in a literal bloodbath. Katniss is perturbed by this idea as well, but the first person in the Capital she actually respects and connects with his her stylist Cinna.

Cinna is the first Capital citizen we meet who is not decked out in Effie-level finery. He opts for clean black clothes and subtle gold eyeliner. To Katniss, this makes him approachable. But as a reader, I was keen on how this presentation hints to us, “here is a man who sees past the distraction.” It is also interesting to note that the only other two Capital citizens with more subdued wardrobes that we meet are Plutarch Heavensbee and President Snow, the revolutionary and the tyrant respectively.

Back to Cinna, he is new to the games this year and has requested to work with District 12 specifically because he wants to make a statement. District 12 is frequently the most dehumanized of the districts. They are the poorest, the smallest, and most of their tributes die almost instantly in the games. Cinna capitalizes on the impression Katniss makes at her Reaping, and he turns her into a showstopper. This is where Katniss’s notorious Girl on Fire nickname comes from, a phrase that is cited as a cry to rally behind her and the rebels when war officially breaks.

Throughout their work together before the 74th Games, Cinna turns Katniss into burning coal and a fiery inferno, but after the games the strategy takes a turn. In order to withdraw Snow’s attention from Katniss as a threat, Cinna and Haymitch explicitly state that they will capitalize on portraying Katniss as a young girl in love through their fashion choices. Soft makeup, cupcake dresses, and giggles. In Catching Fire it becomes clear that Snow saw through this, and the strategy is abandoned. Katniss is back to being alluring and powerful, unknowable and a raging inferno. This is both emotional and physical through her styling. At the chariot parade for the 75th games, Finnick Odair asks Katniss what happened to those little girl dresses. She tells him she outgrew them.

It is also worth noting that Finnick, who is later revealed to be what is essentially Snow’s Capital sex slave, is wearing virtually nothing. Katniss says he is, “draped in a golden net that’s strategically knotted at his groin so that he can’t technically be called naked, but he’s about as close as you can get. [She’s] pretty sure his stylist thinks the more of Finnick the audience sees, the better.”2 Here, it is being shown to us that Finnick is also being controlled by fashion, and so is the public’s perception of him. It also is quickly clear that Katniss is a member of that fooled public.

Later at the interviews for the Quarter Quell, Cinna transforms Katniss into a literal Mockingjay born out of the ashes of her wedding gown. This can only be seen as an overt act of rebellion. Cinna’s use of fashion as a statement of protest is so visceral and strong that he is executed. Snow knows more than most how powerful fashion can be, but more on that later.

Tributes in the Arena

When I saw The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes film I was taken aback by how much it impacted me to see the tributes of the 10th Hunger Games go into the arena in their Reaping clothes. It always struck me as interesting that it remained tradition across Panem through to Katniss’s time to go to the Reaping in your Sunday Best, so to speak. Seeing children dressed up in finery in this context has a grave impact, especially when we look at the poorer districts and know just how much work and sacrifice it takes for these citizens to afford even a simple dress. I imagine this tradition is a last attempt to portray the children of the districts with some dignity. If they are to be televised as they are sent to the slaughter, they should at least be able to look their best and hold their heads high.

But oh my god was it chilling to see the children of the 10th games in that arena wearing these clothes. There was something especially jarring to me about the portrayal of Reaper, the District 11 male tribute, in the film. His pageboy cap and leather boots really stuck with me. Reaper is potentially the most overtly anti-Capital character in this story (except, perhaps, Sejanus) as he uses his time in the arena as a form of protest by leveraging the flag of Panem as a burial shroud for fallen tributes. While Reaper fought in his bloodied and ragged cap and boots, I imagined his mom scrounging up every penny they had and laying his Reaping outfit out on his bed a few mornings before. Maybe she stitched the elbows every year because it was the only nice shirt he had for everything from weddings, to funerals, to Reapings. After all, we know Katniss’s Reaping dress was a tender hand-me-down from her mother. I read about Lucy Gray Baird in her rainbow dress, a piece that once belonged to her mother as well, and thought of how Tigris cleaned it before the games for her. What was the point of that? It was soon dirty and bloody. Maybe it was just to make her look more like a person, an individual, before she was sent to die.

By the time Katniss is in the arena, all the tributes are outfitted in identical and utilitarian uniforms, and that appears to have been the case for as long as anyone alive at the time of the 74th Games can remember. This can be seen as a practical change, but it is certainly more than that.

After all, Snow is the one who had Tigris clean Lucy Gray’s dress. He knows what such a thing means.

Coriolanus Snow Knows What he is Doing

The opening sequence of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes novel details Coriolanus Snow (later President Snow) essentially freaking out because his cousin, Tigris, isn’t back yet with the dress shirt she has been fixing up for him. The Snow family has been living in secret poverty, and he knows how important it is for him to dress right in order to keep up the illusion. Later Dean Highbottom, a personal antagonist of sorts, gets in an incredibly successful dig in when he points out that he notices Coriolanus’s “too tight shoes,” proving to Coriolanus Snow that his image is not as refined as it seems. This is dangerous for his social and political status, after all he wants to be in charge someday.

It is no coincidence that in the epilogue Coriolanus has undergone both a physical and a mental transformation. For the first time he is not Coriolanus or Coryo, he is “Snow,” and he looks the part too. The film adaptation encapsulates this incredibly well. His hair is whiter, his youthful curls are gone, his suit is blood red (not bright), and his entire outfit is finely tailored. Earlier in the film, Tigris cautions him about turning into his father. She tells her younger cousin that the elder Snow’s eyes were always filled with hate. At the film’s conclusion, Snow asks Tigris how he looks. She looks at him sadly and says, “I think you look just like your father Coriolanus.”3 It’s the first time she has called him anything other than the nickname Coryo

Another element that the movies added to this narrative was Snow’s granddaughter and her affinity for a side braid. Obviously, by the time Katniss reaches District 13 in Mockingjay Pt. 1, she is an incredibly identifiable figure, and a notable style she favors is a side braid. In the film there is a moment where President Snow is eating breakfast with his young granddaughter and notices she has her hair in a side braid. He questions her new affinity for the hairdo and she tells him all the girls at school are wearing it. Snow is incredibly unsettled by this. Later, he addresses the nation and states that all symbols of the Mockingjay will be punishable by death. In this moment, his granddaughter nervously strokes her braid and looks at the floor.

Rapid Fire Examples

There are even more examples of fashion as a symbol in The Hunger Games franchise, and I could go on for days about it. I won’t subject you to that (unless you want to reach out to me separately to discuss), but I will leave you with some rapid fire examples that can’t be forgotten:

Throughout the original trilogy, Katniss’s prep team frequently reusing the braided crown hairstyle from her first Reaping as a callback to both her innocence and how she captured the hearts of the nation.
In The Hunger Games book, Katniss realizing that the Capital must use some injection ahead of the games to prevent the male tributes from growing facial hair. The Capital needs them to still look like young boys, not men.
Effie’s most dramatic moment of character development is in Catching Fire, when ahead of the Quarter Quell she gets herself, Haymitch, Katniss, and Peeta matching gold trinkets (a wink at her last name?) to symbolize to the nation that they are a team. Notably, giving Finnick his bracelet is also how Haymitch gets Katniss to take the District 4 victor on as an ally.
Also in Catching Fire, we learn that Chaff, the District 11 victor and male tribute in the 75th games, has refused a prosthetic arm ever since his first games. He does not want to let the capital sanitize what they have done to him. Though it is not explicitly fashion, it does relate to his visual presentation of self.
When Katniss first meets Johanna Mason after the interviews for the Quarter Quell, the District 7 victor complains about the lame looks the District 7 tributes are always forced into and strips naked in the elevator. The capital does not own her or her body.
When the rebels are filming Propos in District 13, Boggs instructs them to tone down Katniss’s makeup, saying she is a girl who they made like 35. Her effect of youthful bravery and determination is lost if they make her look like a grown woman. She also feels less authentic, which is the entire Mockingjay brand.
When Peeta has been captured and hijacked, his fashion represents his deteriorating state. In the first broadcast he is dressed in white next to a vase of white roses, both the color and flower representing Snow’s power over him. I also couldn’t help but note the strange point to his collar, almost like a knife pushing on his throat as he speaks. Then, in the final broadcast, Peeta’s collar is tight against his neck and shifted askew. Almost as if he is being choked and held at his throat by a symbolic hand.
In the Mockingjay book before the bombing of the medics, Katniss notes that the back of Prim’s shirt has become untucked like it was before her first Reaping. This calls back to the fact that Prim is just a little girl. Interestingly, in the equivalent scene in the film, Prim is wearing a side braid like Katniss’s. This could suggest that Prim is now a woman, but I see it more as an indication that Katniss, too, is still a child. Both formats of the story show that Katniss and her sister are not so different at heart, they just wear their bravery in different ways.
It is never explained to us in either the original trilogy or the prequel why Snow fires his now estranged cousin, Tigris, from her role as a stylist for the games. The cover story given is that she has had too much cosmetic work done, but in the books Snow himself is described as having lips so puffy with filler they look like they will burst, and a member of Katniss’s prep team is literally died green. Evidently, based on the appearance of most of the people involved in the Games, this given reasons feels like a flimsy motivation at best. I think, more likely, he knows that at heart Tigris opposes the Games. Snow also knows how powerful a stylist’s decisions with their tribute can be and cannot risk giving Tigris that power. Look at the fate of Cinna years later.

Conclusion

I’m sure I missed a bunch of notes, but I think this is a good starting place.

I hope you enjoyed me have a little bit of a book club and letting me stretching my media literacy legs, so to speak.m