Growing Playings: Childhood Video Games’ Influence on Current Style
Marc Jacobs. Sandy Liang. Valentino. Gucci. Ted Baker. What do all of these brands have in common? You can make your Animal Crossing character absolutely dressed to the nines in all of them.
Fashion’s influence in video games has grown from simple character options to fully-fledged marketing schemes and digital integrations. As high fashion brands pixelate their products into virtual assets, the fashion industry is seeping into seemingly untouched terrain. But for those who have grown up matching their Club Penguin’s outfit to the color of their puffles, admiring their customized Miis bouncing around the hypnotizingly sterile Wii waiting room or curating their Sim’s look for hours (and not in custom Moschino, which apparently is available now), the confluence of fashion and video games is nothing new. I asked Northwestern students about their experience balancing their virtual fashion with their reality.
Jojo Holm
I was really into GirlsGoGames.com— the classic dress-up flash games, where you choose from a bunch of makeover games. GirlsGoGames games gave me a bigger sense of: “Oh, [fashion] is something I can pay attention to.” It was always pretty clear, like, the sorts of things that go together. I would [also] force all of my friends to play Fire Boy Water Girl with me. My best friend and I had done all the levels until they were 100% perfect. I honestly think that in a broader sense, [those games] being more colorful and fantasy-like, but lighthearted fantasy, influenced the way that I handle clothes. The way that I think about clothes now is: it's how I play as an adult. Dressing up in the morning or dressing up for an event is [like] an adult playing around. And so, I think the fact that these video games were whimsical probably impacted the dress and still impacts the way I dress. I really like to thrift super impractical, but funky and special pieces. Like, I have no business wearing these clothes every day and they will just fit in my closet until the perfect moment arises, but it's so fun for me to have them and have this unlimited style even if it's just gonna be in my room.
I think that the way you interact with video games and which ones you interact with have the capacity to shape your creativity. And your creativity has a huge impact on your fashion. Yeah, there's clear ways where maybe you dress your characters like yourself, but in a much broader sense, the amount of creativity you're using in these games, I think relates to how much creativity you're using in your fashion. And, not to stereotype, but we do see a gender difference in fashion. Maybe that's harder is that like a lot of typical “girl” games growing up are creative and colorful and a lot of “boy” games are strategy and fighting-based. And what we're really doing is limiting male creativity, which flows out into other aspects, one of which is fashion, which is the most obvious.
Olivia Abetya
The second game I ever played online was a Disney princess video game where you could customize your own princess avatar and have yourself in the game. That's the first time I'd ever experienced that sort of relatability to the main character because you were the main character. When I get to customize my character, I usually try to make them look like me, like a literal self- insert moment.
I always played Girls Go Games, specifically the flash game where you dress up this random person, and I remember envisioning, like: this is how I think they would go to school, this is how they would go to a fancy dinner. Even though the game itself was just a dress up game, I would envision whole storylines based off of the outfits I would create for that character. If I have the option to go a step further and choose the smaller details of that larger theme, then I think that definitely goes back to my own personal preferences for colors and my personality.
The virtual space is sort of like a playground for your fashion choices. It can help lead you into new directions on how you want to express yourself later on. It's not just a one-way sort of influence, just you influencing the character. It's the character influencing you as well.
Conner Dejecacion
The first character I remember customizing fully was in the Build-A-Bear online game. Oh my god, you know where you got to build a bear, and then you could upload it. I made them look like me, or as close as I could. When I was younger, I was more concerned about what my character looked like. But I think as I've gotten older, I've paid more attention to my characters, and I tweak them a lot more based on what game I'm playing, like Cyberpunk 2077, for instance.
Videogames [give you] that sort of ability to experiment. You know, not just with clothes, but also gender expression and stuff like that. It's not just experiencing the world of any given video game or the gameplay, but [it’s] also what you get to be in that game. I really love the options in Cyberpunk 2077. It’s got hairstyles, skin, clothes. It has everything you could want. Which is nice because if you want to be a certain person, it really gives you the latitude to do that.
Video games provide you the opportunity to experience these stories that you couldn't otherwise through the lens of some other person. And I think clothing is just one element of that—the level of expression in modern games is insane.
Ollie Sara
I played a lot of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Minecraft as a kid. I would honestly say that my personal fashion sense influenced the game more than the game influenced my fashion. I tried to dress the character up as closely as I dress in real life. It’s a low-stakes form of experimentation. It doesn't cost anything to get started [and] dress up your character. Also, if it looks kind of bad, nobody really cares. You can try out a bunch of different stuff, and maybe find something that suits you in real life. And when you put on something that has a reference to a video game, people sometimes come up to you and talk to you about it. Then you make friends with people that you wouldn't have made friends with.
I could definitely see cyberpunk influencing some fashion trends as well—through Blade Runner 2049 and games like Cyberpunk 2077, they really revived the genre. So what you get with that is the cascading effect of people picking up the aesthetic again. I'm sure you could see people wearing things from [those] game[s], even if it's indirect. There’s [also] this trend of people dressing up like Y2K: baggy cargos and skinny tops and stuff. I think it's [partially?] inspired by Jet Set Radio, which is this really old Sega game where you're on roller skates [and] doing graffiti, but it's so stylish and so cool. The characters have such cool designs that it's so easy to take fashion inspiration from that.