The Hunger Games Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky has some of her work on display at the Hollywood Costume Exhibition, opening October 2 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, which puts 150 legendary costumes on display. Makovsky sat down with Fast Company to talk about some of her work. She talked about something every superfan of The Hunger Games has probably wondered at some point: Why does Katniss' hunting jacket - supposedly a hand-me-down from her father - actually fit her perfectly? I admit it, I've wondered!
When we started designing Katniss’s hunting costume, we tried to follow the description in the book exactly. The book describes her jacket as her father’s old hunting jacket. We drew inspiration from American mining work clothes, and also looked at leather jackets from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. But the first jacket we made, from leather, really didn’t look good. Because it was meant to be her father’s, it was oversized, and way too big and bulky. It impeded her from shooting the arrow. So finally, after testing it out, I said, “I think we should make a jacket that actually fits her.” I knew superfans might be disappointed, but in a filmic, realistic sense, the oversized jacket just didn’t work.