Dressed for success: Inside the future of fashion and games | Playable Futures

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This series of Playable Futures articles considers how the design, technology, people, and theory of video games are informing and influencing the wider world. You can find all previous Playable Futures articles here.

For decades, the conventions of fashion and style were well established. The 20-year fashion cycle would reliably roll around, bringing various styles in and out of vogue on a two-decade loop. Various youth subcultures over the years – from punk and raver to goth and skater – would be framed by a blend of fashion, music and ideology. Youngsters would join those subcultures as a way to express identity and belonging, subscribing to them loyally for years, their self-imposed dress codes bubbling up to the catwalk, as high fashion simultaneously trickled down to the pavement from luxury brands. In the space between those two opposites, high street fashion and streetwear exist and persist, taking their cues from both subcultures and fashion houses.

In the late 20th century, the postmodern mindset would start to trouble those conventions a little, introducing concepts such as irony, pluralism and self-referentiality. Suddenly, things weren't quite so clear cut. Sociologists of style would argue that at the turn of the millennium, we began to be freed from the meanings certain clothing carried.

But postmodernism was just the start of a grand change. In the years that followed, video games established themselves as a true cultural phenomenon, and offered the worlds of fashion an abundance of opportunity, challenge, and change.

"People from the world of fashion will increasingly be thinking of games as something like venues, or maybe destinations"

For one, 'gamer' as a subculture of its own emerged, offering a broad, vibrant style palette informed by the things we play. Soon after, the fascinating phenomenon of the 'skinification of fashion' would radically shift the very notion of subcultures, meaning, and 20-year cycles. More on that below.

The largest shift,