The GameCube was the hottest fashion accessory of its time

polygon.com:

It is October 2002 and you’re at Hollywood’s hottest party. To the left you see Paris Hilton, clad in an aqua-and-lime-swirled halter dress that would make a 2022 Depop-er swoon. To your right is Christina Aguilera, whose newsboy cap perches on her head as her cargo gauchos swing gingerly on her hips. At any other event, these divas would have all eyes on them, but here they are just specks amongst the rest of Hollywood’s early 2000s glitterati — Leonardo DiCaprio, Alicia Silverstone, the cast of Scrubs — all of whom carry the season’s hottest accessory:

The GameCube.

Similar to its successful contemporary, Apple’s clamshell iBook, GameCube was designed with a quirky, techy flavor that ruled the 2000s, right down to the perfectly ergonomic handle. Both were marketed as equal parts fashion and function, each utilizing (and paying for) the powerful early-aughts celebrity engine to attract attention and advertisement. It worked for the iBook, but can the same be said for Nintendo’s second-worst-selling console?

In 1998, Nintendo began work on a top-secret initiative it dubbed Project Dolphin. The console later known as GameCube was Nintendo’s attempt at building a game system differently than its competitors: Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s newcomer, Xbox. Nintendo Japan wanted to build something for friends to play together that prioritized fun and whimsy — and distanced itself from the edgier lineups on PS2 and Xbox.

As part of that, Nintendo would have to convince gamers to get behind a radical concept:

Purple.

“It wasn’t that you couldn’t bring out hardware that was a different color, it was just a very… ‘female’ looking color. It just didn’t feel masculine,” said Perrin Kaplan, former vice president