Netflix's Squid Game is an Unlikely Fashion Hit

 You might have thought that with lockdown coming to an end, your faithful tracksuits that have seen you through many a zoom meeting (from the waist down) have been resigned to their usual place at the bottom of the wardrobe. And then along comes Squid Game, and the tracksuit has suddenly reappeared on the fashion world radar again. The global success of the show - and the uniform outfits worn by it's protagonists have propelled the humble tracksuit  from slobby, stay at home gear, to the star piece of your wardrobe. 

Jung Ho-yeon as Number 067

Jf you have somehow managed to miss it, Squid Game is the Korean thriller that’s currently on track to become Netflix's most-watched show ever.

Scoring the biggest series launch in Netflix history, with no less than 111 million views in under four weeks, according to the streaming platform, the South Korean series is well on its way to breaking all kinds of records. Starring Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo and Jung Ho-yeon — who have gained millions of Instagram followers in just a few weeks — the drama follows a group of indebted individuals risking their lives in a survival competition for a high-stakes prize: more than $35 million.

The premise of the show seems to have struck a chord in a world hit by uncertainly and lockdown job uncertainty, while at the same time also sparking interest in the clothing and accessories worn by the show's main characters - the main focus being on the teal coloured tracksuits worn by the players of the game. The tracksuit is labeled with a participant number, from 001 to 456, and worn with a pair of white slip-on Vans sneakers (incidentally, exactly the same as a pair I sold on ebay last month for £9, but that's another story). 

Soon, our large band of tracksuited desperados are joined by a much smaller crew of staff wearing fuschia/red, nylon jumpsuits, their faces obscured with game-controller-button masks. 

Since its September 17 release, like any truly contemporary TV hit, thematic and visual elements from the show have steadily gone viral: Tiktok was inundated with users trying to make and break the dalgona candy that was used as part of one of the games, a massive weaponized robot-doll, and, now, even the standard-issue 70s normcore tracksuit uniforms worn by the Game’s 456 crushingly in-debt “players” competing to the death to win the jackpot. 

According to data compiled by the retail aggregator Lyst, global searches for retro-inspired tracksuits (+97 percent), white slip-on sneakers (+145 percent), red boiler suits (+62 percent), white numbered T-shirts (+35 percent), and even the colour teal (+130 percent) have all jumped since the show’s release. Lyst announced a 145% increase in searches for the white slip-on sneakers a few days after the release of the series, stating that Vans were the most viewed sneakers on the platform.

In capital-F Fashion news, Louis Vuitton named one of the show’s breakout stars, Jung Ho-yeon, as its newest global brand ambassador yesterday. An established print and runway model, including at Vuitton, since being a runner-up on Korea's Next Top Model in 2013, Jung makes her acting debut in *Squid Game—*and in the nearly three weeks since the show premiered, her Instagram follower count jumped from 410,000 to over 16 million.

The anti-capitalist show drove a Vans buying spree

The fashionification of a hit show is nothing new. Particularly with Halloween around the corner and the costumes so easy to replicate. However, the irony of a series where the plot explicitly parodies the depravities of capitalism, now driving a buying spree of replicas of it's minimalist retro costumes, is a dystopian turn of events worthy of the show itself.