Hot buttons: why fashion houses are getting into video games

As players spend more and more time and money in the digital hangout spaces provided by video games, it makes sense for fashion brands to join them there - opening up exciting worlds of rule-breaking design

In December 2015, the revered French fashion house Louis Vuitton made a surprise announcement about the advertising campaign for its forthcoming spring-summer collection. 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. Nicolas Ghesquiere, the brand's creative director told the press he considered Lightning to be the perfect avatar for a global heroic woman". The fictional character even carried out interviews to promote the partnership.

It was not the first time a fashion brand had collaborated with a major video game. Previously, H&M, Moschino and Diesel had made digital clothes for The Sims. Diesel had its own island in PlayStation 3's ambitious metaverse forerunner, Home. 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. 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.