Yon December 2015, revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the ad campaign for its upcoming spring-summer collection. The new range of clothing and accessories would be modeled on screen and on the pages of fashion magazines not by a famous actor or pop star, but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s creative director, told reporters that he considered Lightning the “perfect avatar for a global heroic woman.” The fictional character even conducted interviews to promote the association.
It was not the first time that a fashion brand collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino, and Diesel had made digital clothing for The Sims. Diesel had his own island in the ambitious precursor to the PlayStation 3 metaverse, Home. But in the last two years we’ve seen an explosion: Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren on Fortnite, Balmain on Need for Speed, Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci on Roblox, Marc Jacobs and Valentino on Animal Crossing, Lacoste and Burberry on Minecraft. Most collaborations now involve both digital and physical collections: when Lacoste partnered with Minecraft, the company produced an entire wardrobe of clothing and accessories; when Balmain teamed up with Need for Speed Unbound last November, it produced a themed limited edition of its B-IT sliders, while in-game runner Eleonore wears a dress from the house’s Fall 2022 collection.
Why is this happening now? How have games become popular places to reveal and market new fashion lines?
In part, of course, it’s down to the numbers. Today, 3 billion people play video games around the world, generating revenue of $200 billion by 2022. It’s an absolutely huge entertainment industry with a diverse user base, and it’s still growing. “Businesses want to be where consumers are. It’s as simple as that,” says Federico San Martín, director of associations and licenses for Minecraft. “The games industry has grown very fast, it has surpassed Hollywood. Traditional marketing has evolved. Twenty years ago, TV advertising was everything, but I have two teenagers at home who don’t watch TV. Their consumer is in gaming right now.”
It’s also about the way people play. Minecraft, Roblox, Animal Crossing, and Fortnite have become digital hangouts for both chatting with friends and playing games. “The reality is that more and more people are living in these worlds, our lives are becoming more and more digital,” says Phillip Hennche, director of channel innovation at Burberry. “Virtual worlds are increasingly a part of our own world. The younger generations, especially, don’t think of it as ‘my physical life’ and ‘my digital life’. It’s all the same.
While TV is fragmented into a myriad of competing streaming services and very specific fan communities, great video games provide broad and reliable focal points. “Minecraft is broad, diverse, and gender neutral,” says San Martín. “Minecraft is on Xbox, PlayStation, smartphone… They even play Minecraft in the Vatican. Video games are where the dollars are.”
Gen Z gamers who grew up with smartphones and social media are used to exploring and expressing their identities in digital spaces: they expect in-game characters to be conduits of their own sense of style, which has led to a Increasing focus on personalization and personalization of avatars. Games like Fortnite, Animal Crossing, and Grand Theft Auto offer thousands of digital outfits and accessories to buy and wear, often locking the best items behind in-game achievements so that reaching them grants additional status.
“This is a space where you constantly need to show off and flex your skin, to have something that no one else has,” says Matthew Drinkwater, director of the Fashion Innovation Agency at the London College of Fashion. “That idea of self-identity is very much in line with what fashion is all about, particularly on the luxury end. There is something visceral and emotional in the way of buying fashion; no one buys anything simply for functional reasons at that end of the market. You buy it because you fall in love with it and because it says something about you. And those same emotional reactions are replicated within virtual spaces.”
The games also welcome the creativity and imagination of the players. You can build houses in Minecraft, design interiors in Animal Crossing, create levels in Fortnite, and these things attract fashion houses. “Burberry has its roots in the outdoors and exploration and discovery, all of these pioneering adventures that are part of our heritage, equipping great expeditions to remote parts of the world,” says Hennche. “And that’s what Minecraft is all about too… Minecraft is an amazing place of creativity.”
The pandemic also had a massive effect. “It changed everyone’s perspective on where a generation started to spend a lot of their time,” Drinkwater says. “Platforms like Fortnite and Roblox were attracting huge numbers of people, and for the first time, the industry was forced into virtual spaces. It wasn’t just about playing, it was about connection. It was about spending time together. It seemed like an absolute no-brainer that the fashion industry would get involved.”
Marc Jacques Burton, who founded the fashion label MJB and has dressed musical artists like Jay-Z and Drake, recently collaborated with Overwatch 2, producing a capsule collection of clothing based on characters from the game. “Every time I work with someone, I understand their way of thinking. I can pick up on their energy and their influences,” he says. “The Genji piece is made of organza, it has these spiked effects that are really complex to do. We sew the fabric in circles and create spikes. Hopefully people who like Overwatch will recognize it as something Genji would use.”
“The cape we made was a silk satin, another complex piece to design. It had the MJB lightning bolt print all over it and the colors and flow of It’s there. It was really beautiful. It was great for me as a designer, since I had never done a cape before. Working with Overwatch really pushed my limits.”
Drinkwater envisions fashion brands using the same digital assets that are used to create both physical and digital collections. “One of the exciting things about the technology is that it allows for incredibly easy customization,” she says. “I could scan a physical product, I could include it in [3D modelling software] Blender and then immediately start changing the textures. A consumer could say, ‘I’d like to see that green,’ and we could do it. And if we can move production much closer to the point of retail sale, then consumers could be in the store looking at garments that we could instantly change and have made locally.”
Perhaps the Final Fantasy titles of the future won’t just be marketing space, they will be storefronts. You play as Lightning, then change the colors, textures, and fit of her outfit, go to a store, and do it. It’s cosplay on a large scale. Or maybe the next generation of great fashion designers will create entirely for digital spaces, allowing them to transcend the physical limitations of real-world clothing.
“I think that’s why virtual fashion is so exciting,” says Hennche. “Each [digital] The universe has its own set of parameters and physics, so there’s no stopping what your creative minds can bring to life.” Visualize clothing that would break the rules of texture, shape, gravity, and functionality; fashion designers could operate like Cinna in The Hunger Games, creating dresses that burst into flames.
As Burton says, “This just opened up a whole new world. Traditionally, a designer would make a physical product that he would sell in a store. Now I think there will be all these opportunities to create virtual clothing, virtual skins, even virtual weapons, which can then be made available in a game. It will bring all the worlds together… I’m excited to see how these opportunities evolve in the game. I think we’re just scratching the surface, I really do.”
For 30 years, haute couture has made tentative forays into gaming culture, always ready to show off its understanding of new trends and technologies. But now, more than something to play and pass the time, games are places to hang out; they are shopping malls; they are catwalks. If big tech gets its way and builds a highly monetized multiverse, the future of gaming and fashion will come together forever.
