Finding an engaging and innovative solution to the usual runway show has been the main preoccupation of many fashion designers while we live a social distanced existence during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Most fashion houses have turned to digital presentations, but others opted for more ambitious formats. Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga, for example, feeling a film was a dated idea, went for a video game.
Fashion has been exploring this possibility for quite a while now with advertising campaigns featuring iconic video game characters, capsule collections inspired by video games and in-game collections matched with real-life capsule collections, not to mention how "Animal Crossing: New Horizons" for Nintendo Switch turned this year into the cutest platform for fashion presentations.
Balenciaga's free game, "Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow", was launched online last Sunday and is available to be accessed on every device (while an Oculus VR headset and a yellowed letter drenched in a fragrance created by scent artist Sissel Tolaas to view a separately recorded Balenciaga fashion show was sent to professionals for review purposes).
The game is set in the year 2031, but the clothes and accessories you will be discovering while playing it are part of the Fall 2021 collection. Gvasalia is a fashion, rather than a game designer and, while he likes playing car racing videogames, he doesn't know how to create a videogame, so he turned to a team that employed the advanced real-time 3D creation platform Unreal Engine to develop this fashionable video game. According to the fashion house's press release this is actually "the largest volumetric video project ever undertaken."
The game was developed around April when most of us were still going through the first Coronavirus wave, or slowly hoping to get out of lockdown, while there were no definite news yet of a Coronavirus vaccine.
Balenciaga's models had to be digitally scanned in a studio in Paris and then incorporated in the game and the same technique was also used for the lookbook images.
In the videogame you're a hero on a quest and you walk through a series of levels, or rather, zones: environments go from a Brutalist Balenciaga boutique set in a parking garage-like space to a urban concrete jungle with skyscrapers covered in adverts à la Blade Runner, to a magical forest and a mountain.
As you walk, you bump into fashion-obsessed zombies – pardon – characters dressed in Balenciaga designs. While the game is set in the future, in the age of tomorrow, style-wise the ensembles actually look like yesterday, in the sense that many pieces seem borrowed from Vêtements and Balenciaga's previous collections.
The medium has changed for Balenciaga and this is a video game rather than a runway, yet not much has mutated in Gvasalia's vision and here we still have his usual tropes.
They go from oversized outerwear such as massive padded jackets and blanket coats, to casual hoodies, from a huge NASA puffer jacket and rucksack (rather unoriginal considering that the NASA logo has been applied to all sorts of clothes by designers and fast fashion brands as well) to T-shirts printed with game-convention or Playstation 5 (is this an official collaboration?) logos, sweaters covered in holes and denim pants literally hanging by a thread.
Apparently the worn out clothes were a reference to the habit of wearing something till it falls apart which is a very honourable concept (yet what is honourable in selling pre-trashed luxury clothes? Are they designed so that the wearers can pretend they have been wearing them for ages and are therefore into sustainability or that they are so wealthy they can afford fakely destroyed garments? The dilemma remains). Sustainability was also present in a coat made with shredded leftover fabrics reduced to a fur-like texture.
Gvasalia's collections often revolve around one pièce de résistance, be it a bag or a pair of shoes, and the highlights of the Fall 2021 collection appear to be high-heeled articulated and armoured boots for that Joan of Arc touch (well, sho doesn't need an armour in Coronavirus times). In the videogame the boots appear through ripped jeans, they are matched with puffer jackets like the NASA one or with draped dresses, evoking the style of those painfully hip armoured ensembles that often appear in videogames (think about the attire of Sephiroth in "Final Fantasy VII" View this photo with some Michiyo Inaba S/S1999 thrown in View this photo).
Made by an artisan in the south of France who forges Medieval armors, but made in soft leather, the boots created a dichotomic feeling between the urge to rush to a galaxy far away and the possibility of fighting a chivalrous quest.
The game is actually conceived as a quest: Gvasalia dubbed it an "allegorical adventure" (well, which video game can not be considered an allegorical adventure in some way?) and, after too many padded jackets, ripped jeans and armoured boots, the game closes with a final allegory about human destiny.
After you descend into different zones – the store, the city and a black forest that will eventually take you to an illegal rave and a mountain top, like Dante at the end of the Inferno who gets to see the stars again, you get to the sun rising and, accompanied by artist Eliza Douglas in full Joan of Arc armor and brandishing a sword, you reconnect with nature, learning to breathe again (yes, you got it, the game gets you to a breathing App).
There are pros and cons in gamified runway shows: game-wise in this case they definitely managed to create engaging environments with attention to details like Balenciaga's designs in the shop or the adverts in zone 2. Yet while they focused on the landscapes they forgot the action that is more or less is non-existent.
Fashion-wise they didn't add an in-game shopping option and that was a mistake as the potential to actually play and shop for clothes and accessories would have been an added value. As it stands, despite its grand hero boots, detailed environments and super hip outcast characters presented like video games heroes (a concept and configuration that Max Brewer, a student from Central St Martin's claimed were taken from his lookbook that he sent to Balenciaga/Gvasalia in October hoping to get an internship), buses that twist into the sky and a breathtaking mountain landscape, the game is a rather passive experience consisting mainly in following the lit up arrow on the ground, a path to conceptualism that unravels in a breathing App.
We all play video games and escape to alternative worlds on a PC or console for different reasons, to relax or discharge our stress and emotions for example or disconnect and reset, and the best games are the ones that manage to keep us entertained and make us forget all our troubles. But, in this case, after a while you lose any interest you may have had in the game.
That's a shame cos it may have been a great idea as there are actually some connections between making a video game and making a collection – in both cases you start from scratch, choosing textures or textiles to build your environments or your garments. So, while "Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow" is not material for the Games Awards, maybe one day we will get the "Best Fashion Video Game" category and, who knows, in future video games may even become the ultimate tool to democratise fashion.