'Working for the Few': Fashion, Class and our Imagined Future in The Hunger Games

This article contends that the first two screen adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games creates a space for critical reflection on the currently intensifying levels of global inequality under late capitalism through its creative imagining of the future relationship between fashion and class. It argues that both the first film of the trilogy The Hunger Games, directed by Ross (2012), and the second The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, directed by Lawrence (2013), in their representation of a figurative dystopian state ‘Panem’ estrange our day to day experience of fashion by juxtaposing it with dress, restricting fashion as a social practice to the elite social class in Panem’s capital city ‘Capitol’. In encouraging the development of this Suvinian ‘cognitive effect’, this article argues that the films ask us to reappraise the basis of fashion in our own world as a fetishistic regime of consumption and also to look again at the class dynamics of society and the role of fashion and celebrity within these. In doing this, however, importantly, both films resist any simplistic condemnation of fashion and celebrity, instead pointing to how these spectacular cultural dominants might be used to ferment resistance to injustice in order to mount a challenge to the seemingly unassailable power structures that perpetuate it.

This is a contribution to a special edition of the journal 'Film, Fashion and Consumption' which focuses on fashion and class in film. Please see the publisher's website for the final version of record.