So I walked through something like 10 stores at the mall that feature women's wear: Von Maur, Dillard's, Forever 21, so on and so forth. They have lots of clothes...and most all of them absolutely atrocious. My wife, who dresses simply but with generally good taste, would never wear most of the stuff in those stores. It's not that they are necessarily skanky (being wintertime, not a lot of very revealing stuff out there), it's just that they are overly colorful, overly decorative clothing that place so much more emphasis on some weird thought of 'style' than they do functionality. She's very practical, as am I...anything that won't really wear comfortably so that she can work, she doesn't want. She'd probably be most happy shopping at a sporting goods store to get some sweatshirt and comfy pants, but I had thought that I'll at least look in 'regular' clothes stores.
About the sixth store I was in it finally hit home where I shopping: the great mall of Panem.
It started to become clear that whatever store I was in had completely gone off the rails as far as fashion is concerned. Overly fashionable, utterly useless clothing for living seemed to be what I found, anywhere I went. It's not just that I thought "she'll never wear this", but rather, "why on earth would she ever wear this?" Most of the clothes in these stores would not have seemed that far out of place in Panem, and most of the fashions of Panem do not seem that radical for our modern sensibilties. Our celebrities are more like Panem than we think.
What's more, every once in awhile I would look at labels to look at price but I also noticed where they were made: Bangladesh. Vietnam. Pakistan. Could you make the case that each of these places are 'districts' that cater to the whims of the global superpower? In the Hunger Games each of the twelve districts work only to meet the needs of the bloated victors; are things much different in the real world? Yes, we say, we are helping these countries by providing a market for what they produce...but at what cost? Are they really being helped, or are we just justifying our bloated consumer economy by saying that they get to receive some of the scraps of our economic might?
