The model was odd with slinky pants, sailor tops and fingertip sneakers, but my seatmates didn't notice any of them. He was too busy climbing the Fortnite leaderboard. The firing flames from the triangular tube top could have passed, and this guy would have continued to pound computer keyboards like a Liberas on the piano.
On Sunday evening, in Paris, along with 200 LAN parties, a fashion show was performed spectacularly, to make the fashion show a lot more useful. (Short for Local Area Network, but this now surprisingly old-fashioned online gaming method brings people in one space to play video games together on shared networks.)
The Coperni runway was set up for four rows of gamers. Their faces bent around the digital world of Fortnite with a truck that looked like a hummer, squealing their faces in the tweaked green light of computer monitors as they fired guns at each other.
When the show began, players kept it, and the clicky sound of keystrokes competed with percussive taps hitting the floor of the adidas arena, with the heels of the models spongy.
The concept was “a homage to the game in general and a respect for celebrating this subculture from the '90s,” according to Arnaud Weilant, co-founder of Coperni.
Still, there were no real crossovers in the two procedures. Coperni's fur jacket could not be played with a joystick. Video games were related to dress. There was no epic message here about the inevitable nature of technology. It was two glasses, sandwiched between each other and made a new, mixed one.
Gamers were “cast” by brand with the support of esports organization Gentle Mate. Some were Proport players. Many were friends. At least one claimed to be a complete beginner.
“We played Final Fantasy with Zelda when we were younger, and it's classic, but now we're in a different world, another generation,” Weilant said. “We always love to unite our communities, so fashion and games are meeting now.”
In the front row, guests were wedges between players. My right young man stretched out the keyboard to get better leverage and made it crazy like a finger on the keys. He wore a headset and a Coperni branded tee, as well as his 199 peers. They had already been playing for hours when the show people arrived. The final winner is to receive the stolen goods from Coperni.
It appears that the few players I spoke to didn't like answering my questions, rather than dumping their enemies into oblivion. I found out they were often Fortnite players, but I really didn't know what Coperni's clothes looked like that afternoon.
They probably aren't. These players were horribly locked up. They didn't seem to be looking at the flowing screen with that striped blazer. They paused a minute's click and did not take a picture of the halter neck dress.
I'm not a video game reporter, but a fashion critic, so it was my duty to rate clothes, but I was not good at seeing my seatmate fall to 15th place in his game.
This is a compiled collection and spared us the literal Fortnite logo of the clothes. (Balenciaga had already done it in 2021. It's during the early period of metaverse frenzy, reflecting the rather shallow “look at my logo, I get you!” approach in the luxury industry.)
Still, in the head nods of the 90s (denim jackets with rhinestone card stamps, everyone), if you're trying to find them, there was a hint of video games. The leg harness with a small pouch was a pure Lalaloft. A series of dresses glittering down pixels on the screen. The shiny tan red leather jacket was a clear dupe worn by Angelina Jolie, a Suzukimoto jacket worn in the 1995 “Hacker.” Some of the dresses looked gorgeous like pillows, so we could imagine drained gamers reusing them for a nap after the show. Behind the scenes, the designer described the show's theme as “choosing your own player.”
When the model made its final turn, I saw a player near me having a hard time navigating the track to lift the cliff face. I wasn't sure if he was winning, but he never broke the focus. I didn't do that either. The game got me, not the gown.
