The Hunger Games, the Met Gala, and the Value of Fashion

It's a flawed industry. But so are they all

I had the great fortune of reading the Hunger Games series before the age of social media. I was a young and inexperienced reader, full of probably misinformed opinions that, for the good of all, I was unable to air publicly. The Hunger Games fans of today, however, are well represented on social media. They discuss the series with great zeal, if not always a great deal of sense. For example, I saw one TikTok user declare something akin to “if you are excited about the new Hunger Games prequel, you are the Capitol.” So, I guess, author Suzanne Collins must have written her new book hoping readers … wouldn’t want to read it?

But there’s one take that has resurfaced around this time of year for several years in a row, one I see more often than all the others put together: the idea that the Met Gala, held every May by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to raise money for its Costume Institute, is the ultimate representation of the Hunger Games’s Capitol¹ in our world.

There’s an obvious answer to why this is: the Met Gala quite literally looks like the Capitol. It’s not difficult to connect Collins’s descriptions of Capitol fashion, with its bright colors and ostentatious, “unnatural” designs, with the bright colors and ostentatious designs celebrities typically wear to the Met Gala (though not as daily wear, as the Capitol citizens do). Someone pointed out that Zendaya’s outfit last year — for a theme based on a short story about a wealthy couple who isolate themselves from ordinary people — looks a lot like Effie Trinket’s outfit in the movies, and it was all over from there.

It’s natural, in these fans’ eyes, to assume that Suzanne Collins would view the Met Gala as the repulsive and wasteful bacchanal that they do. She’s been misquoted as saying that a fashion show inspired The Hunger Games (this isn’t quite the case; it was actually people competing on reality television and the Iraq War). Collins isn’t on social media — good for her, I say — so it’s difficult to know her true thoughts on any news item unless she explicitly tells us about it.

We do, however, have access to Collins’s writing in her Hunger Games books. While rereading the first two recently, I was struck by her descriptions of Katniss’s pre-Games outfits, created by her stylist, Cinna:

The creature standing before me in the full-length mirror has come from another world. Where skin shimmers and eyes flash … Because my dress, oh, my dress is entirely covered in reflective previous gems, red and yellow and white with bits of blue that accent the tips of the flame design. The slightest movement gives the impression I am engulfed in tongues of fire.

I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.²

Later, after Katniss has won the Games, she wears another Cinna creation:

The sheer fabric softly glows. Even the slight movement in the air sends a ripple up my body. By comparison, the chariot costume seems garish, the interview dress too contrived. In this dress, I give the illusion of wearing candlelight.³

Then, in book two, a similar moment to the first quote:

He turns me toward a mirror so that I can take in the entire effect. I do not see a girl, or even a woman, but some unearthly being who looks like she might make her home in the volcano that destroyed so many in Haymitch’s Quell. The black crown, which now appears red-hot, casts strange shadows on my dramatically made-up face. Katniss, the girl on fire, has left behind her flickering flames and bejeweled gowns and soft candlelight frocks. She is as deadly as fire itself.⁴

Collins’s writing is not typically flowery; her protagonist, Katniss, doesn’t tend to mince words. Katniss also grew up in an environment where keeping food on the table took precedence over what people wore. But in these quotes, she is awe-stricken, and I think Collins is, too. This writing is the work of someone who respects fashion as a tool of resistance, but also as an art form, one with the power to transform people into something greater than themselves. But again, we can’t say for sure what Collins thinks about real-world events. She has chosen privacy, a decision we must respect. Maybe she finds the Met Gala reprehensible. Maybe she doesn’t. We simply don’t know.

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Many Hunger Games fans who say the Met Gala epitomizes the Capitol cite not just its lavish costumes but its expense. It’s true that the Met Gala is expensive. Tickets last year cost $75,000 (though the celebrities wearing designer outfits rarely have to pay to attend). The event cost about $3.5 million to throw in 2022, and it likely cost even more in 2024.

That sounds like a lot of money, and it is. But there’s another annual pop culture event whose production costs run much higher — up to $100 million — and which gets much less online criticism for displaying excess than the Met Gala does. It’s the Super Bowl. In fact, there are several large-scale entertainment events that cost more than the Met Gala to produce. The Oscars cost over $50 million last year. The Paris Olympics cost around $8 billion, and that’s not even a record.

Aspects of these events also echo the Hunger Games. The way Games victors are treated can be compared to American football’s reputation for incentivizing low-income young men, many of whom are Black, to play professionally, later abandoning those who suffer significant brain damage and become addicted to painkillers. The 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro displaced thousands of residents from their homes, many of whom were also low-income and Black. But though these events don’t escape criticism, I don’t see them referenced as dystopian half as much as the Met Gala, nor do I often see people calling for them to be abolished entirely.

Could it be the Met Gala’s aesthetics that people are responding to? Could it be its highly publicized ticket price? Those are certainly factors. But I think there’s something else. The Super Bowl and the Olympics, which happen to be masculine-coded athletic events, are seen as a valid contribution to culture and society despite their expense, and the Met Gala, a feminine-coded event whose fans are mostly women and gay men, is seen as frivolous. A tale as old as time, or, at least, as old as the patriarchy.

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The Met Gala was originally, and still is, a charity event. It funds the Met’s Costume Institute, an institution that was made part of the Met in the 1940s but has never received funding from the museum at large. Last year’s Met Gala raised $23 million, a record amount that will fund the Costume Institute for the entire year. Most of the Institute’s 33,000 pieces of historical clothing are not on display at any given time, but there’s a yearly exhibit that accompanies the Met Gala, which is open to the public from May through October.

Some of the Met Gala’s critics may not be aware of the reason for its existence. But some think its status as a fundraiser is insufficient justification. They claim the Met Gala is insignificant in the face of serious world events like the genocides in Sudan and Palestine. This is correct, but no artistic or pop culture event is as important as preserving human lives. I don’t think this is a compelling argument to stop creating art or studying art history. But maybe these Met Gala critics don’t think of fashion as art or as history. Some derisively refer to the vast collections of the Costume Institute as “old clothes.”

I was a Hunger Games fan, but I am also a clothes horse, and fashion actually played a major role in my personal understanding of gender. The fashion history YouTube videos I watched during the early days of the pandemic taught me that Victorian corsets, far from being the instruments of patriarchal torture I had previously believed them to be, were comfortable, practical, and largely made by women. Working women with active lives wore them, too; Scarlett O’Hara’s tight-lacing technique wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t the norm. Without the intrepid fashion historians who brought this information to the general public, I and so many others would have gone on believing that Victorian women were silly, vain creatures willing to give themselves organ damage to serve the patriarchy.⁵ In a world where the thoughts, desires, and pursuits of women of the past so frequently went unacknowledged, studying the clothes they made and wore provides us invaluable insight into their lives. We cannot lose that.

Of course, even if fashion taught us nothing, it would still be a legitimate art form, worthy of praise. In Haili Blassingame’s recent essay about Katie Kitamura’s lip gloss preferences and why everyone should shut up about them, she references a fashion historian she once interviewed:

One of the things she talked about is how no one really questions paying millions for a Picasso, but we question paying large sums for fashion. One is art, the other is a hobby. She told me this is because the making of clothes—sewing, knitting, weaving—has traditionally been women’s work, often poor women’s work, and so we don’t value it. We don’t think we should have to pay that much for it. She also explained there are so few fashion history programs in the country for the same reason—fashion isn’t taken seriously as an academic discipline.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. But I do also understand why people might think fashion, particularly high fashion, isn’t made for them. The fashion-forward ideal is typically an able-bodied, straight-sized, gender-conforming white person with enough discretionary income to shop at designer stores, and those who don’t fit those criteria often struggle to gain visibility in the fashion world. I’d like to think that this year’s exhibit theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” will shed light on the fashion achievements of more marginalized designers, and that the Met Gala costumes will take inspiration from that. But celebrities are famous for ignoring the Met Gala theme (or for gaffes such as Cara Delevingne’s “peg the patriarchy” outfit, or, I’m sorry for mentioning it again, Kim Kardashian’s Marilyn Monroe dress debacle), so who knows.

When they do get it right, though, it is spectacular.

Ashton Sanders in Casablanca in 2022, inspired by the uniforms of the all-Black regiment The Buffalo Soldiers (image by Mike Coppola)

Quannah Chasinghorse in Prabal Gurun in 2022, with jewelry by Lenise Omeasoo (Getty Images)

Mona Patel in Iris Van Herpen in 2024, featuring mechanical flowers on the sleeves that open and close (image by Alikhan)

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one could raise of the Met Gala: the generally apolitical nature of the event and suppression of protesters outside, for example. I also think it’s valid to push for more sustainable fashion practices, or for ensuring that the people who made the costumes were paid a living wage. But ultimately, this event is not directly responsible for most of society’s ills. When the world’s problems feel too large to tackle, it’s easier to point our fingers at one entity — “that, there, that’s the Capitol!” — than to examine the deeper societal structures that contribute to these inequalities, how we ourselves may be contributing to them, and how we can embark on the long work of changing them.

That work will need doing whether the Met Gala continues to happen or not.

1. For anyone who somehow missed not only the books AND the movies AND the prequels, but the million daily cultural references: in the Hunger Games series, the Capitol is the ruling city of the nation of Panem. The Capitol exploits labor in Panem’s 12 districts in order to enjoy relative wealth, and unlike the districts, the Capitol’s teenage citizens don’t have to participate in the reaping for the Games each year.

2. The Hunger Games, pages 128-129

3. The Hunger Games, pages 354-355

4. Catching Fire, page 287

5. If you’re wondering how this misconception started, it’s women’s suffrage. Men who didn’t want women to vote claimed women’s corsets restricted blood flow to their brains. Like so many other baseless, misogynistic assertions, it caught on.