the hunger games prequel is an aesthetic nightmare. a costume case study
^ fancy title for a glorified rant. idc.
hey so i watched the ballad of songbirds & snakes (2023) yesterday. if you don't know anything about the movie, it's bad¹. also it's the 10th hunger games and lucy gray is the district 12 tribute. she's culturally not really 12, but member of a roma coded nomadic group, and a well regarded (in the district) singer. we first see her at the reaping, and this is what she wears (she wears the same outfit for like half the movie because the games weren't fancy reality tv yet so she doesn't get costume changes or anything) (also kinda bad pic bc i wanted something horizontal also i can't find much better ones)
the second i saw this outfit i knew i was in for a bad time.
(btw i think this print on print blue dress over blue shirt on the left is great wish they'd gone for something like this instead)
here's the whole outfit, sorry for the vertical space i'm gonna take up:
(you can't tell from the pic but there are fairly tall heels on those boots. i'd estimate 5cm. pretty and good for performing, but you'd sprain an ankle really fast on that rubble)
now. why do i hate this. first off i think it's ugly. i don't really like the whole top being white because i think it looks a little disjointed — the swiss dot parts of the skirt look more off white / cream / ivory than the top part, and there's no lavender at all up top, and i think that looks awkward. not only that, but the dress coordinates very poorly with the stays. i think the stays are mostly nice (but you can tell they're not very stiff by the way they crease at the waist. which is nitpicky of me but i think they'd look nicer…); the cream is nice, but none of the colors in the print go together with the dress — blues and greens come out of left field, and the shade of pink is strange with the sunset-y colors too. the dark blue binding is very stark and doesn't match anything else in the outfit. the boots i have no complaints other than the heel, but they don't match the stays either.
anyway that's not the point though. a character can wear ugly poorly coordinated outfits and that's not a cinema sin. plenty of reasons to do that in fact, whatever, i'd just complain and move on. but what i actually take issue with is that she does not, in fact, have a reason to wear this specific combination of garments and it drives me up the wall. what she wears is distinctively fashionable to our 2020s eyes and entirely different from what every other district person in the movie is wearing. she stands out not only within her district but among all the tributes too (because they dressed the other 23 kids as street urchins).
here's the thing: the movie is kinda half-heartedly going for a more or less midcentury retrofuturism thing. kinda fallout-y. we don't linger for long at district 12 (and we barely saw it as of this first lucy gray scene), but they wear a lot of shirt dresses and 40s silhouettes in general (not too dissimilar from what katniss and prim wear for the reaping at the first movie). lucy gray might not be culturally 12, being forced to settle in the district by the capitol, but it's been at least ten years so the resources she has are gonna be similar. and even though the dress is her mother's, we see nothing like it anywhere else — when presumably other people would also still have access to surviving pre-war stuff.
so my pressing concerns with this are that these clothes look like they were made in our very own 21st century. i mean, they were, but uhh that's a bad thing for post apocalyptic speculative fiction set in an unspecified future?? the print on the stays looks digital (not hand painted, block printed or even silk screened). the tulle is synthetic, and the vibrant dyes look synthetic too. swiss dot, at least, can be cotton, but the outfit looks capitol, doesn't it? the other people on 12 are all wearing natural fibers, basically all cotton it seems, and blue is a common natural dye (shoutout to woad).
later on, she wears a bright purple dress. i'm talking very saturated. goldenrod crochet bikini. peasant-y boho blouse with clear machine embroidery and trims. also do you know how expensive broderie anglaise is? this bootleg 2006 vanessa hudgens shops at free people while everyone else seems unfamiliar with the concept of laundry.
and they don't even style her hair.
btw my solution off the top of my head would be to simplify the textiles — give her chambrays and calicos for example — and use actual handmade details for embelishment; she could maybe have simple bead and macrame accessories too for depth and texture; and red would be a good color if you want her to stand out so bad. keep it looking fairly natural though and don't fully neglect the blues
stays absolutely have to go though. they're have such a specific silhouette i can't really see them working unless it's widespread yknow. i think a quilted vest could fill their role well. or some other sort of bodice with hand-decorated elements. something she made herself for the stage that looks very distinctively her. but focus on the handmade.
and of course background characters and other tributes deserved some attention. could be great for worldbuilding how the districts became what they're like during katniss' era. even so close to the war they'd have some cultural differences and you just don't see that here
[1]: it's bad: the character arcs (if you can call them that) are nonsensical, there's very little to care about with the story too because you know where snow is headed. it's just trying to rehash the first book / movie but the thing about katniss as a protagonist is that she's interesting and we spend time with her and understand her motivations and stakes and she works for her victory. lucy gray is just kinda there and succeeds because she's the specialest girl ever. and the acting is very poor. hunter schafer, viola davis and peter dinklage slay as expected but there's very little of them