Ready Player Fashion: The Intersection of Video Gaming, a Pandemic, and a 2030 Sustainable Fashion Transformation

As published on the GoodHuman website on 2/23/2021

By James Glasscock and Alexis McDonell

If we said that pretty soon you might end up buying clothes that don’t exist in real-life, would you believe us? It might seem like an outlandish question, but the reality isn’t as crazy as it seems.

Let’s start by looking at our present reality.

Humans are cutting down billions of trees a year, filling the oceans with plastic, and contributing to drastic biodiversity loss. There's a growing scientific consensus that we have a short window to radically reduce our emissions and take urgent, transformative action to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. This will demand significant change from industries of all kinds—including fashion.

The Coronavirus pandemic has further exacerbated problems within the fashion industry. As more people stay home, their relationship with fashion is changing. There's less of a need for new clothes, or at least clothes without an elastic waistband, for the foreseeable future.

And we saw a number of powerful brands bail on paying their suppliers for work that had already been completed. Many are still grappling with how to move mountains of unsold inventory—not a new problem in even the best of times. Likewise, the secondhand clothing trade, which helps to divert the industry's growing pile of waste from going to landfill, is struggling to keep up, as thrift stores are overwhelmed with stock and lockdown measures impede business.

Fashion is hurting, and our "new normal" sees no end in sight.

Jobs that once relied on central offices are now successfully being completed remotely, leading some companies to question the necessity of maintaining a traditional HQ (with others such as Facebook and Twitter already choosing to integrate a remote workforce permanently).

Perhaps, it's time to heed a few lessons from an industry of digital pioneers. Pioneers, like the video game industry. Hear us out.

Video gaming is the awakening giant of the entertainment sector, with the global games market generating $180 billion in revenue in 2020. That's $80 billion more than the film industry earned in 2019.

Gaming has cracked the code for creating digital experiences that people are very obviously willing to pay for (and get dressed for!).

Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, already generates billions of dollars a year on "skins," which are digital outfits and accessories for in-game characters. Student loan portal lendEDU surveyed 1,000 Fortnite players, finding that 69% of players spend money on the game, dropping an average of $85 with the bulk of that money going toward skins. Recent research published by Statista suggests that consumer spending on skins will reach $50 billion by the end of 2022.

Who would have ever expected a video game to be one of the fastest-growing fashion and accessories companies on the planet?

Some traditional fashion players have started to bridge the gap between these two seemingly dissimilar worlds. Louis Vuitton has had several buzzy collaborations with gaming giants Final Fantasy and, more recently, League of Legends, which involved a real-life capsule collection and in-game prestige skins.

Amidst the pandemic, Valentino, Marc Jacobs, and Anna Sui released virtual versions of their in-person collections for players to dress up their character in the popular Nintendo game Animal Crossing, while Givenchy Beauty and Gillette provided in-game beauty customizations.

Right now, much of branded video game experimentation is purely being used as an additional marketing frame, another way for consumers to interact with brand iconography. But as the boundary between our online and offline lives continues to blur, fashion brands may need to start examining the viability of these virtual spaces as a significant source of revenue.

In 2018, Scandinavian retailer Carlings released its first digital clothing collection. Participating customers would send in their image to be "digitally tailored" to feature the clothing through photo manipulation. The demand was so high that pieces sold out in a week, with each piece costing between €10 and €30.

Similarly, virtual attendees at 2020 Helsinki Fashion Week could pre-order physical outfits or claim a limited edition digital garment. Digital designs could be "dressed" onto a picture for use on social media—a unique combination of one's bodily self with a digital garment that never physically existed.

After seeing the success of these early steps into digital fashion, we saw the launch of XR Couture, The Dematerialised, and DressX as marketplaces for designers to sell and for customers to buy digital-only designs over the last few months.

Some critics say digital fashion lacks a use outside social media, but The Dematerialised’s co-founders Karinna Nobbs and Marjorie Hernandez believe it has quite some value. By authenticating 3D assets on a blockchain, they can be owned and used not just in static images but also in video games, virtual reality, and to collect and sell as digital art.

In the short term, digital clothing could be a way for consumers to avoid buying an excess of outfits just to take a single picture in them. Essentially, digital fashion allows people more room to self express while reducing the environmental impact (since there are no resources used to produce a literal garment. However, in the long term, we may find ourselves in a future where our WFH wardrobe is entirely digital. We could even end up adorning digital garments we've purchased for Zoom meetings.

This could all be excellent news for the planet as virtual fashion reveals a more eco- and people-friendly path forward. Digital clothing gives designers new freedoms to create and allows consumers to still experiment with their style without the intensive resource consumption and subsequent waste that comes with physical garments. Especially one destined to be worn only a few times before it's relegated to an already overwhelmed thrift store or landfill.

So, here lies the big question: how can fashion thrive in an increasingly digital world? Will we be able to keep the magic that is fashion without physical garments? What will happen to the people who are making our clothes today?

By taking it digital, the most creative and expressive parts of the industry can live on better than before, in a virtual space that is very much a part of our life but not damaging to our world.

New digital real estate enables fashion design opportunities to expand to more people leading to an influx of new ideas. Designers will no longer be limited by price, functionality, and fabric. This could be the start of a fashion sphere that can more freely create while drastically reducing carbon emissions and waste in the process.

Lastly, we would be remiss not to recognize how these changes might affect today’s designers and garment workers; it would be dishonest to assume the world will look the same in a decade. As the future of fashion and its workforce changes, how are we going to retrain and create new opportunities?

If history is any sign, automation and digitization of industries has actually led to more work and an expanded workforce. Banks have only thrived since the invention of the ATM machine in 1969. After the creation of the Ford assembly line in 1913, cars became more accessible, which in turn made the automobile, auto safety, and traffic control industries boom. It might mean that some jobs within fashion decline, but others can expand to new heights and the definition of work evolves. And we need to not only think about how this new work scales, but also how the profits could equitably benefit all of the contributors rather than just a few billionaires (the other elephant in the room, which we’ll save for a future post).

With a little sense of adventure, empathetic and thoughtful care, and a couple of cues from the video game industry, fashion's best era is yet to come.