(Meta)morphosis. The giant “bug” in the fashion system

Abstract

In recent years, especially after the pandemic period, many fashion brands have experimented with forays into the world of video games. This is an interesting phenomenon in many respects, which becomes even more so when one looks at the possibility that users have, on various platforms, to customise their avatars. Not only avatars are customisable, but also their clothes, their accessories, in short, their outfit. These productions are often shared on various other platforms, especially on social media, especially of a visual nature, where these digital 'outfits' are shared, reworked, processed. Another sign of this 'cross-fertilisation' can be found in fashion shows hosted in digital environments, from gaming platforms themselves to meta-verticals. An interesting case for the above-mentioned aspects is Animal Crossing, a game platform developed by Nintendo for Switch, a 'hybrid' console. The game is a life simulatorwhere users act in a media context with customised avatars and accessories. Both aspects mentioned above are present in Animal Crossing, i.e. the production by users, bottom up, of fashion accessories, and the presence of brands, which over the years have organised digital shops and fashion shows on the video game. The paradigms of consumption and production underlying fashion objects seem to be moving away from the trajectories traditionally followed and studied by the industry and into an as yet unexplored area. What are the drivers of fashion consumption in this new context? Do the answers traditionally provided by the sociology of fashion remain valid tools for interpreting the phenomenon? To try to answer these questions, it was decided to adopt a mixed methodological approach: a netnography and a visual ethnography of these media productions could aim to reconstruct a visual imaginary of this phenomenon, starting to provide some elements for reflection, with regard to media contexts similar to that of a 'metaverse'.