In the lookbook, presented on the game’s site, each outfit can be toggled around, pushed in circles and up and down, viewed in incredible detail-it looks like the character-selection portion of a video game, but provides the kind of clarity that pandemic-era shows have mostly been lacking. (Isn’t getting through the day enough without having to, like, get some guy in the Balenciaga video game equivalent of Berghain to let you in to get to the next “level”?) The most impressive thing here is the production value.
( Ahhh!) It’s a good story, though a few gamers carped about the game’s limitations-not enough challenges. In the Balenciaga video game, which any old fashion fan can play at, users enter a dystopian Balenciaga store and ascend to environments greener and lovelier, ending with a breathing exercise in a utopia. And a video game, it turns out, is a far more immersive way to bring your shopper into your world than by selling them a baseball cap with a logo on it. For a brand like Balenciaga, though, and its creative director Demna Gvasalia, clothing will always be the message.
You don’t have to say too much with your clothes when people are willing to use them to say something else. For some designers, the answer doesn’t matter a user sharing a clip of a pop star in your collection video is on par with a consumer buying a logo hat or T-shirt. The question then becomes whether the clothing is still the point, or just another form of content in your multi-platform brand-distribution journey.
You have to create films, powerful lookbooks, boxes full of fun crafts, magazines and editorials-or, in the case of the Summer 2021 collection that Balenciaga debuted this past weekend, a video game. To be a major player in fashion-a Louis Vuitton or a Dior, but also a Marine Serre or a Collina Strada, or a Grace Wales Bonner, someone small with world domination-level ambition-you have to be a multimedia platform. To be a fashion designer in 2020 is not simply to make clothes.