Squid Game's green track suits offer a specific, symbolic window into Korean culture

The New York Times

"Despite the global appeal of Squid Game, the ubiquitous, normcore outfits function as a commentary on the nation’s social classes, politics and history," The New York Times' Aileen Kwun says of the numbered green track suits on the hit Netflix global sensation. As Korean Studies professor Jae Won Chung points out, "there are so many levels" to the track suits in representing Korean society. Track suits have become a mark of social status in contemporary Korean culture, adds Jooyoung Shin, a fashion design professor at Indiana University. “When I saw the green track suits, the first thing that came to mind was this notion of ‘baeksu,’” says Shin, using common slang for someone who is out of work. “Baeksu,” which translates to “white hands,” suggests that idle days make for shamefully clean palms. In Korean dramas, seeing someone head to the corner store during the workday, dressed in training-bok — as track suits are called — has become visual shorthand for “characters who are branded as losers, who haven’t gained financial independence from their parents or family or are somehow neglected by the dominant social group or discriminated against in society because of their failures,” says Shin. “Training-bok has become a symbol of this life of baeksu, having this very idle, even parasitic, life.” Kwun adds: "The coded stigma tied to dress is a dead ringer for the pool of 456 contestants in Squid Game, who are united in their desperation for a Hail Mary escape from their financial debts. Though most of the show’s contestants are middle-aged, it’s not out of the question that player 001 — an elderly man whose true sinister involvement in the games is revealed by season’s end — is in it to win it. South Korea’s elderly poverty rate is among the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member nations, according to the O.E.C.D.’s most recent data, despite the fact that the country has risen from postwar poverty to become one of the world’s most prosperous economies in a mere half-century." ALSO: Squid Game has been met with mix reactions in South Korea.