Capitol Couture is using high fashion to boost the Hunger Games brand.
Lionsgate
Adam B. Vary / BuzzFeed
In the past few weeks, citizens of New York City and Los Angeles may have noticed a couple curious billboards advertising a company called Capitol Couture. One features a man wrapped in a burnt-orange-and-white houndstooth body suit and wearing gold wraparound sunglasses; the other features a woman in an abstractly stylized hat and visor staring back at a bottle of perfume labeled "CINNA" with the tagline "L'Essence D'un Champion."
Neither product is real, but if you're a serious fan of The Hunger Games, you have already figured that out. These ads are actually part of an ongoing marketing campaign for the second film in Lionsgate's highly lucrative franchise, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. But rather than straightforward posters and trailers featuring stars Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, the "Capitol Couture" campaign offers an exhaustively detailed dive within the high fashion opulence and ostentation of the main city of the quite fictional nation of Panem.
Capitol Couture was actually launched last year as a more contained effort in concert with the March 2012 release of The Hunger Games. But Lionsgate's in-house digital team has vastly expanded both the breadth of content and the complexity of its presentation, redesigning the site within Tumblr as if you are a citizen of the Capitol who is eager to catch up on all the most in vogue fashions of the 75th Annual Hunger Games. It is already one of the most peculiar and elaborate transmedia marketing efforts ever mounted for a feature film franchise, and as more elements from it continue to roll out in advance of Catching Fire's Nov. 22 release date, here is what you need to know about what's behind it.
