Moschino in The Sims to bikini armour — how games and fashion are colliding
This week The Fashion Awards launched a gaming category, the latest step in a deepening relationship between the two worlds
On Monday, The Fashion Awards inaugurated a new category in their glitzy ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The nominees for the Fashion Award for Metaverse Design were all player-creators from the online gaming platform Roblox. Their entries were judged by a panel of fashion experts including supermodel Karlie Kloss. For those who couldn’t attend in person, a virtual recreation of the venue was created in Roblox, where the award was presented by Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele in digital avatar form. Naturally, some Gucci-branded digital items were also available for purchase.
If it sounds like a publicity stunt, that’s because it was — there was much use of techland’s new favourite buzzword “metaverse”, and only creators from a single game were represented. But this should not detract from the genuine ingenuity of these young creators. This is only the latest chapter in the fashion world’s love affair with gaming, which has been deepening rapidly in the past five years.
At this point, there are hardly any fashion houses that have not made a play. Marc Jacobs and Valentino designed outfits for Animal Crossing, Moschino put its quirky garments in The Sims, while Burberry, Dior, Guerlain and Hermès have all made interactive mobile games. Some have gone a step further: Balenciaga debuted its Fall 2021 collection in a beautiful walking simulator game and in September was the first luxury fashion house to partner with Fortnite, while Louis Vuitton has created clothes for League of Legends and featured Final Fantasy characters in ad campaigns.
There are several reasons why fashion is suddenly so interested in games. First, designers have identified that they are an emerging social space for millions and so represent an attractive channel to advertise to younger consumers. Second, the virtual item market is lucrative, a financial end in itself. But also there is something deeper: fashion gurus have come to understand that games are the new frontier of self-expression for digital natives. They want to be there to define and monetise this emerging space.
While all of this is recent, games have been obsessed with fashion since the beginning. For as long as there have been human characters in games, developers have used their clothing to tell you about who these people are. Fashion is a shorthand to immerse players in the game’s fiction, whether that is a historical period or high fantasy. It is particularly important for the protagonist, the player’s representative in the game. Developers want players to feel not just embodied in their skin, but also in their clothing.
Since they don’t have to go to the trouble of actually making garments or obeying the laws of physics, games have given us dazzling fashions that can stay in players’ minds long after the game ends. These range from the sartorial surrealism of the Final Fantasy series, an infusion of Japanese design, art nouveau and cyberpunk aesthetics, to the smart streetwear of the inkling characters in Splatoon and the many impeccable outfits donned by stealthy assassin Agent 47 in Hitman. One of the most memorable is the eccentric garb of librarian witch Bayonetta, who wears gun-heels and a form-fitting jumpsuit made partly of her own magical hair.
Gaming clothing can be ludicrously impractical (why does Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud wear armour over only one shoulder?), but this is often part of its charm. Unfortunately, these ideas can also play into the pervading objectification of women in games, which gave rise to the famously illogical “bikini armour” — chainmail that covers none of the body’s most vulnerable parts.
Many games allow you to choose your characters’ clothing for yourself, whether by selecting armour or simply making cosmetic adjustments. Players often spend hours customising their characters in The Sims and Cyberpunk. In online games, fashion decisions take on more significance because our avatars are how we are represented to the online world. So rare costumes or “skins” in online games can be traded at high prices — digital goods trading platform DMarket estimates that the virtual skin market is worth $40bn a year.
Within wider culture, games and fashion have a lot in common. They have both endured social stigma, been deemed a superficial interest and a waste of time or money, but have clawed their way to becoming respected art forms. Games and clothing both trade in ideas of agency, aspiration and power. They whisper the same seductive promise — offering the tools to redefine yourself, whether by becoming somebody different or simply more deeply yourself.