Fashion In Gaming Or Gaming In Fashion?
With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, many fashion brands have chosen the digital sphere to focus their marketing endeavors on, which slowly set the stage for it to crawl into the gaming world. This collision mutually benefits both industries as it opens up a whole new revenue channel for fashion brands. At the same time, the gaming world is capitalizing on the collaborations between games and designers/celebrities. Although fashion collaborations existed in the gaming world before the pandemic, it is the pandemic that acted as the catalyst that attracted fashion to gaming.
Let’s look at some examples.
Valentino, Tommy Hilfiger, and even Marc Jacobs partnered with Klarna — a shopping platform- to virtually refurbish fashion outfits. Then there’s Gucci that partnered up with a multitude of games such as Roblox, Animal Crossing, The Sims, League of Legends, Tennis clash, Pokemon Go, and Genies, all in a period of one year. Why? To recreate digital versions of its runway costumes with its iconic motifs. Louis Vuitton partnered with Riot Games to launch a capsule collection for League of Legends and Burberry with Tencent to create skins for Honor of Kings. We can honestly keep going on.
When we talk about games benefitting from these collaborations, we can look at Fortnite and how it was one of the first games to incorporate high fashion into gaming by partnering with Ariana Grande to create a limited-edition event called the Rift Tour where players could play and dress like the singer herself (with the iconic high ponytail and mini dresses).
However, smaller brands have joined in on the action as well. The Polish brand MISBHV collaborated with Grand Theft Auto and created graphic streetwear ensembles. I think it also sits nicely well with the brand’s aesthetic. Plus, they created looks that worked well in the virtual world and in real life- an aspect that is highly needed to appease the gamers’ expectations.
When two worlds as different and as unique as fashion and gaming collide, it gives way to a new combined world with the positive and negatives of both cultures. It is, however, tricky because the needs of gamers and fashion consumers tend to be very different. If fashion brands focus too much on the product plugs to reach gamers, the approach tends to be meaningless and unauthentic, which ruins the narrative and immersion. Brands need to understand the importance of creating ‘real’ experiences for gamers by representing the garments authentically.
Another issue that these brands face is maintaining the brand identity in a relatively new space and engaging a new, demanding consumer base simultaneously. It is quite a task. The best gaming and fashion crossovers will contain a mixed set of strategies that personally cater to the communities they want to serve and reach while adhering to the brand DNA. If they don’t realize this importance, brands risk becoming irrelevant among a new generation of customers who barely can see the difference between real life and the virtual world.
The gaming industry is much bigger than the music and film industry combined, and the value directly pegged from video games is $180 billion- $200 billion. This number includes the revenue from the sale of gaming hardware like controllers, consoles, and in-game advertising and purchases. The global market for recorded music is $21.6 billion, and the global entertainment industry surpassed $100 billion in 2019 for the first time. This helps us understand the magnitude of the gaming industry in just half a century of its existence and what a vast and capable market it will be if handled responsibly.
Fashion is expressing interest to tap this potential revenue stream from the sale of virtual products and clothes. Still, most importantly, it is used as a way to extend themselves into the virtual world, as more and more people are spending their time online. They want to be present and ready to embrace the future of the industry. It also proves to be an essential element used by fashion -being such a creative field- to create an interactive and immersive ‘experience,’ something that escapes the restraints of the physical world. Gaming also protects luxury brands by allowing them to maintain their integrity, iconography, and brand image.
It is not just about skins or clothing, though. The makeup for characters in games is taken as seriously as the garments. The game Dead By Daylight featured cosmetics that are a prevalent and vital component of the game as the game revolves around characters with unique histories and different fashion tastes that the player can choose from.
Apart from this, it is crucial to consider first-person-shooter games, where one sees a limited opportunity for fashion collaborations because I think the character and the way the creators have dressed them is significant to the storyline. To leave that up to a fashion brand and its ‘skins’ would definitely break the immersive experience that the player is expecting. Even worse is to dress up notable characters in clothing that makes very little sense compared to their character missions. We have all seen our fair share of female characters in overly sexy and barely-there bikini tops with micro skirts, which, at this point, are culturally appropriated in fantasy-oriented games.
It is not just in the gaming world, but fashion has also seen similar struggles of cultural appropriation as often called out by the Instagram account @diet_prada, considered the industry’s watchdog. But, there are ways where both the gaming and fashion industries can promote creativity in each other. For example, fashion brands can design and create virtual costumes that provide functionality and fantasy. In turn, they get the opportunity to experiment with clothing construction in a way that is limited by the physical world, like that of human forms and gravity. This emphasis on clothing in video games leads the way to richer gameplay and helps attract more female and non-binary gamers. This, in turn, increases the opportunity to monetize on the sale of skins which mutually benefits both industries.
The pandemic basically forced fashion businesses to find new ways to reach customers as all of the shows and fashions events were canceled. As the industry saw the age of luxury customers decreasing, it needed to find a way to appeal to them. Fashion is constantly seen taking inspiration from the youth, and the youth is online and are playing games. All of them. Plus, there is a rise in the average gamer’s age today, and it is 35 now, a steep increase from the bracket of 16–24 that we saw before. An older crowd meant they had more economic capacity and more disposable income to make in-game purchases.
What is the motive behind gamers purchasing in-game?
The size of the gaming market corresponds to a big culture. This means that the gamers are interested in setting themselves apart through in-game costumes and makeup. Mac was attracted by the game Honor of Kings because the game’s demographics showed that more than half of the users were female and less than 24 years old. So they decided to collaborate with the game and created a range of limited edition lipsticks. On the other hand, in collaboration with designer Nicole Cuddihy, Gillette Venus went a step ahead and catered to the beauty needs of these gamers by allowing them to add acne, body hair, stretch marks, cellulite, and freckles to their in-game avatars. Users now want to create a strong identity online and build a sense of personal style in a growing virtual world with millions of users. Another reason in-game purchases are thriving is that they encourage a gentler and more circular approach to fashion. At the same time, they build and nurture a strong sense of community, which is very similar to what they find in gaming communities.
An industry that was initially slow on the uptake of digital solutions is now seen grappling at it. An essential aspect of luxury brands entering the gaming field is democratizing fashion. When Moschino partnered up with The Sims, they provided the gamers a chance to dress their avatars in Moschino’s designer items. They allowed millions to become part of the high fashion Moschino world, making fashion accessible to those who longed to be part of this world.
As brands use this space as an advertising tool now, they are increasingly focusing on the next step, which would be to capitalize on this massive audience through e-commerce. I guess all we have to do now is to sit back and watch how brands figure out exciting new ways to drive traffic to their e-commerce destinations. The future of fashion in the gaming field looks promising and exhilrating.
