The models whooshed by in slinky pants, sailor tops, and finger-toed sneakers, but my seatmate noticed none of it. He was too busy blasting his way up the leaderboard in Fortnite. A triangular tube-top shooting flames could’ve gone by and this man would’ve continued hammering on his computer keyboard like Liberace at the piano.
On Sunday evening in Paris, Coperni, a French fashion label with a yen for stunty events, staged a fashion show conjoined — admirably, if oddly — with a 200-person LAN party. (Short for local area network, this now-largely archaic method of online gaming has people commune in one space to play a video game together on a shared network.)
Coperni’s runway was set against four rows of gamers, their faces aglow in the twitchy green light of computer monitors as they swerved around Fortnite’s digital world in Hummer-looking trucks, and fired guns at each other.
When the show began, the players kept at it, the clicky sounds of their keystrokes competing with the percussive taps of the model’s heels striking the floor of the cavernous Adidas Arena.
The concept, said Coperni’s co-founder Arnaud Vaillant, was “a tribute to gaming in general and to celebrate this subculture from the ’90s.”
Still, there was no real crossover in the two proceedings. Coperni’s fur jackets weren’t playable via joystick. The video game had zilch to do with dresses. There wasn’t really a grand message here about the inescapability of tech. It was two spectacles, wedged beside each other to make something newly chaotic.
The gamers had been “cast,” per the brand, with the assistance of Gentle Mates, an e-sports organization. Some were pro e-sports players. Many were friends. At least one claimed to be a total novice.
“We’ve played Zelda and Final Fantasy when we were younger, the classic stuff, but now it’s another world, another generation,” said Mr. Vaillant. “We always like to link communities together, so fashion and gaming are meeting now.”
In the front row, guests were wedged guests between players. The young man at my right angled his keyboard to get better leverage, tic-tacking madly with his fingers on the keys. He, like his 199 peers, wore a headset and a Coperni branded tee. They had already been playing for hours when the showgoers arrived. A winner at the end would be receiving Coperni swag.
The few players I spoke with seemed loath to answer my questions rather than jettisoning their opponents into oblivion. I learned they were frequent Fortnite players, but didn’t really know what Coperni’s clothes looked like before that afternoon.
They probably still don’t. These players were terrifyingly locked in. They did not appear to glance over their screens at that striped blazer flowing by. They did not pause their million-a-minute clicks to take in a halter-neck dress.
I’m a fashion critic, not a video game reporter, so it was my duty to assess the clothes — though I was distressed to watch my seatmate fall to 15th in his game.
This was a composed collection, and one that spared us the literalist Fortnite logos on the clothes. (Balenciaga already did that in 2021, reflective of the luxury industry’s somewhat shallow “look at my logo, I get you!” approach to gamer outreach during that early period of metaverse frenzy.)
Still, amid a lot of ’90s head nods (a denim jacket with a rhinestone tramp stamp, anyone?) there were videogame allusions if you were attuned to spot them. The leg harnesses with little pouches were pure Lara Croft. A series of dresses twinkled like falling pixels on a screen. A glossy tan-black-and-red leather jacket was a clear dupe of the Suzuki moto jacket Angelina Jolie wore in 1995’s “Hackers.” Some dresses looked plush as pillows, such that I could picture a drained gamer repurposing them for a nap after the show. Backstage, the designers described the show’s theme as “choose your own player.”
As the models made their final turn I watched a player near me struggle to navigate a truck up a cliff face. I couldn’t tell if he was winning or not, but he never broke focus. I didn’t either. The game, not the gowns, had got me.
