The True Meaning Behind the Squid Game Uniforms
The protagonist of the series is Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father with many debts who lives with his mother. Seong Gi-hum’s motivation to enter the game is to be a better father to his daughter as well as to pay for the surgery that her mother needs, “squid game” is a mysterious game show that promises a large sum of money to whom win (38 million usd).
The other main participants are:
Kang Sae-byeok, a defector from North Korea who needs money to bring her mother to Seoul and get her brother out of the orphanage.
Ali Abdul, he is an immigrant worker from Pakistan whose boss has refused to give him his salary for the last six months.
Cho Sang-woo, a financier who is super in debt and who put his mother’s business and house as collateral unless she pays it.
Finally, Oh Il-nam, an old man who has a short time to live due to a brain tumor.
The twist that the series takes at the end of “squid game” is that Il-nam is still alive, well at least for the last episode and he was the one who created the whole game and why? because he was rich, he no longer knew what to do and he was bored …
The general theme of the series revolves around a critique of global capitalism causing damage or havoc to the lower classes, all participants in the game have some debt issue and are willing to put their lives at risk in order to pay them.
Those who appear doing the “dirty work” in the game are those in red suits since they are also a “lower” part of capitalism and do the Persian tasks such as cleaning the corpses, taking and bringing the participants and giving them to eat.
The upper class or VIP, well, they are the spectators of the game who see the lower class just for entertainment, treat them as if they were racehorses, make bets among themselves.
Having all that in context and a real overview of what the series is about now if we move on to analyze the uniforms and outfits that appear.
Colors
In an interview with Vanity, Director Hwang Dong-hyuk said:
I must admit that I have been inspired a lot by Japanese comics and animation over the years. When I started, I myself was not well with my finances and I spent a lot of time in cafeterias reading comics including “battle royale” I came to wonder how I would do if I participated in the games myself. but I found the game too complex.
So it sounds as if the choice of the games was to make it easier to understand and we didn’t have to pay much attention to the rules of each one and even if that was the intention of the series, using “child’s play” makes it an extremely haunting environment.
The first challenge is “green light, red light”, probably without mentioning it and knowing how to play it, most of us know what it is even if it doesn’t have the same name, we know how it works, and so, out of nowhere, the players start to be eliminated in a very crude way. The series makes us feel uncomfortable to see how they create a totally different environment when they begin to play these “child’s games”.
The concept of presenting innocence as danger also holds up and makes more sense for the uniforms they wear. The players wear green sports uniforms, not armor or prison uniforms, Hwang was inspired by the gym uniforms that he used when he went to school to make the ones they use in the series.
The guards wear a pink uniform, an innocent color that contrasts perfectly with the assignments or the crude work they are put to do. obviously everything was intentional.
Hwand said in an interview for Korean Netflix:
Let’s make the colors look very childish so it’s not scary.
The guards also wear symbols on their masks: a circle, a triangle or a square to indicate rank, but these shapes also serve as a mini reference to the controls of a playstation that adds to the innocence and joy of the uniforms.
Uniforms
According to Jennifer Craig author of the book “Uniforms Exposed”
Unifromes have been an essential element for society, especially where group identity is important, as a mark of distinction, social status or as a mark to belong to a group.
The two groups that are wearing uniforms are the players and the guards, “green vs. pink”. The design of the jump suit was inspired by the uniforms used by the employees of Korean factories, it is a very interesting choice since on the one hand, work uniforms are used for mere protection on some occasions and depending on the work they are doing and how We saw in the series, the guards did, more than anything a, “dirty” job.
As for the players’ uniforms, which are rather like jail uniforms, each player is assigned a number, their names do not matter. When a player dies, what they mention on the loudspeaker is the number and not their names. So even though their uniforms are a bit trendy, their clothing is used as a form of control to erase their own identity. Even when players are transferred to the facility, they are unconscious and having to be dressed by other people has a significant parallel to the way in which incarcerated people are treated upon entering jail.
