Up until a few years ago, it would take a while for a passing obsession to become a steady trend. Thanks to the power of the Internet and social media, nowadays when something arrives on the scene it quickly spreads globally. Take the gaming and fashion trend that we spotted a while back with Super Mario inspired garments and accessories from Moschino's S/S 16 collection and then with the Louis Vuitton S/S 2016 advertising campaign featuring Lightning, the heroine of role-playing and storytelling game "Final Fantasy" (she first appeared as a playable character in "Final Fantasy XIII").
In some ways this wasn't anything new as fashionistas may remember Prada's costumes for Shinji Aramaki's mecha anime "Appleseed: Ex Machina" (2008) and pyschological drama "Evangelion" being behind the collection developed by Akiyoshi Mishima's label Fugahum for online retailer Radio Eva, but it showed a genuine interest of the fashion industry for videogames.
Yet, recent releases have proved that it also works the other way round. An example is the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC action-adventure stealth video game "Dishonored 2" that seems to have interesting connections with fashion.
Developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, the sequel to 2012's "Dishonored" is set in the fictional coastal city of Karnaca where Empress Emily Kaldwin has been deposed by a usurper.
As a player you can be either Emily or her bodyguard and father Corvo Attano and employ their supernatural abilities (or engage in series of violent to conflicts…) to regain the throne.
Architecture-wise Karnaca was based on southern European countries such as Greece, Italy, and Spain, but the creators were mainly influenced by paintings, sculptures, architecture, fashion, and technologies from the 1850s.
Designers paid particular attention to the wardrobe of their characters, studying different types of fabrics and tailored elements to make some of the garments such as the jackets more realistic and credible.
The game Art Director, Sébastien Mitton, descends from a line of Italian tailors and dressmakers, and was raised by the sounds of scissors and sewing machines, so he was inspired also by his personal background in this game.
Victorian fashion was one firm element, but also the theme of the industrial revolution in the making, so most garments seem suspended in uncertain times, between the past and the future. Wardrobes were also adapted to a southern country, so designers mainly opted for lighter fabrics, textures and colors, while they took into consideration also the characters' ages, origins, backgrounds and position in society (and in factions).
The game designers also studied Burberry and the form and function of dynamic outerwear, and they referenced American illustrators Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951) and his attention to the silhouette of his characters and the fabrics of their clothes.
These elements helped the game creators to make sure that the costumes of the various characters reacted in accordance with the anatomy of the character wearing it.
For example, in the case of Delilah Copperspoon, a witch, the antagonist of the previous game's Downloadable Content packs, "The Knife of Dunwall" and "The Brigmore Witches", the half-sister of Emily's mother and a very tormented person, the silhouette and shapes of the costume helped giving the character a sinister aura.
Making sure that characters' costumes fit the environment was another extremely important point for the team that wanted gamers to focus on the different roles of the characters and their social classes.
In the game aristocrats keep their layers of clothes on, shirt, vest and jacket, even if the heat is unbearable; the working class characters remove instead their shirt and show marks of the sun on their body. This allowed designers to add more depth to the characters, showing the texture of their skin and their body marks.
Mitton also encouraged his team to eliminate any possible generic costume elements that did not allow to immediately identify the characters, by paying attention to the smallest details of their costumes. "In old movies, when a scene happens in a pub, for example, you can clearly identify instantly who does what: the butcher, the postman, the banker, the office manager, the driver," Mitton told the team during briefs. "Nowadays, if you enter a bar, it's extremely difficult to detect who works where."
Emily Kaldwin was a tricky one since the game had to show her fifteen years later since she appeared in the first game. Emily is a young empress and a thrill seeker, so she required a costume that reflected her authority but also gave her the mobility she needed.
Mitton found inspiration in a photograph of Ruby Aldridge from the Céline A/W 2011-12 fashion show. Now defunct InAisce, the New York-based "anti-trend label" launched a while back by designer Jona, provided Mitton with inspiration for the technical construction of the jackets and materials.
The original costume for Royal Protector Corvo Attano was designed while "Dishonored" was still planned to be set in London 1666, so it was inspired by the long coat of the highwaymen, but it was then adapted to the style of the other characters, while his roles of father of the Empress, spymaster and assassin were taken into consideration to tweak the garments.
The team efforts were repaid as, praised by critics when it was released in November, "Dishonored 2" recently won the award for Best Action/Adventure Game at The Game Awards 2016, but its connections with fashion do not stop here.
Fashion designer Maya Hansen collaborated with Bethesda and Arkane to create two new outfits in collaboration with Arkane Studios, and inspired by Emily Kaldwin and Delilah Copperspoon.
Her designs seem to be more apt for cosplayers in love with the steampunk trend than for everyday wear, but this link with game studios and fashion designers is here to stay and may become more intriguing in the future, generating maybe further collaborations with such studios and new careers for fashion students, not a bad idea considering the fact that the fashion industry is currently oversaturated.
So the fashion and gaming connection that started at the beginning of this year as an opportunistic way to win the attention of younger consumers devoted to gaming rather than to fashion, may be turning in 2017 into something more interesting and, who knows, even have an impact on fashion presentations.
Will we see any VR shows or gaming experiences on the runway at some point next year? Who knows,but you can bet that something along these lines will happen at Chanel: Karl Lagerfeld swings like a pendulum between technology and traditions and, while Chanel's S/S 17 show took place in a mock-up data center, its Métiers d'Art 2016 collection revolved around crafts and traditions and took place yesterday at The Ritz in Paris, so you can bet the next show will once again be about technology.
All our bets are on retro videogames, maybe with Chanel's own arcade, customised courtesy of MiArcade, where you can get your own classic arcade video game machine cabinet for around 1,000 Euros. Fantasy, you say? Just wait and see.
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