“Here is a space in which you are constantly needing to show off and flex your skins, to have something nobody else has,” says Matthew Drinkwater, head of Fashion Innovation Agency at London College of Fashion. Games such as 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 attaining them confers extra status. Gen Z players who grew up with smartphones and social media are used to exploring and expressing their identities in digital spaces: they expect game characters to be conduits for their own sense of style, which has led to an increasing focus on avatar customisation and personalisation. “Minecraft is on Xbox, PlayStation, smartphone … They even play Minecraft in the Vatican. “Minecraft is broad, diverse and gender neutral,” says San Martin. While TV fragments into a huge variety of competing streaming services and highly specific fan communities, the big video games are providing broad, reliable focal points. The younger generations especially don’t think about it as ‘my physical life’ and ‘my digital life’. “Virtual worlds are increasingly a part of our own world. “The reality is, more and more people are living in these worlds, our lives are increasingly becoming digital,” says Phillip Hennche, director of channel innovation at Burberry. Minecraft, Roblox, Animal Crossing and Fortnite have become digital hangouts, as much about chatting with friends as they are about playing a game. Photograph: © Courtesy of Burberry and 2022 Mojang AB. Most of the collaborations now involve both digital and physical collections: when Lacoste partnered with Minecraft, the company produced a full wardrobe of clothing and accessories when Balmain partnered with Need for Speed Unbound last November, it produced a themed limited edition run of its B-IT slider shoes, while in-game racer Eleonore wears a dress from the house’s Autumn 2022 collection.īurberry meets Minecraft. But in the last two years we’ve seen an explosion: Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren in Fortnite, Balmain in Need for Speed, Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci in Roblox, Marc Jacobs and Valentino in Animal Crossing, Lacoste and Burberry in Minecraft. Diesel had its own island in PlayStation 3’s ambitious metaverse forerunner, Home. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims. It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership. Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the “perfect avatar for a global heroic woman”. The new range of clothes and accessories would be modelled on screen and in the pages of glossy magazines not by a famous actor or popstar but by a video game character: the pink-haired warrior Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. In December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection.
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