The luxury fashion houses of Paris and Milan may seem a million miles away from a gamer in their bedroom with the curtains drawn.
Yet as the world of video games has grown into a $176 billion industry, with an estimated three billion players worldwide, the likes of Louis Vuitton are finding it impossible to ignore.
The high-end French brand has launched a smartphone game, called Louis The Game, to mark 200 years since its eponymous founder was born.
The game follows Vivienne, a flower-shaped mascot who — naturally — dresses in Louis Vuitton clothing and unlocks stories about the founder’s life while crossing whimsical versions of Paris and other landscapes.
Louis Vuitton is not alone. The Italian brand Moschino teamed up with Electronic Arts in 2019 to create a clothing range for the game The Sims. The collaboration allowed characters to wear a range of Moschino clothes, including a $595 hoodie and a $1,295 backpack.
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The British label Burberry launched B Bounce, which centred on a deer-shaped character wearing its gilets and puffer jackets. The American brand Marc Jacobs and the Italian luxury house Valentino have both released digitised clothes for the online game Animal Crossing, while Gucci launched a virtual garden for the game Roblox.
Analysts say such partnerships are not just publicity stunts but show fashion brands are eager to reach out to a new audience and tap into younger generations. The research company Kantar estimates that almost 90 per cent of Generation Z — born between the late 1990s and early 2010s — are gamers, and have a purchasing power of $44 billion.
“They [the brands] don’t want to lose touch with younger generations,” Louise Shorthouse, a gaming analyst at the analytics company Ampere, said.
She said gaming companies were creating increasingly realistic characters whom players aspire to be like, meaning they are more influenced by what they wear. “For some consumers, characters from games are role models in the same way that a musician or a social media influencer might be. So this is about putting popular characters in luxury fashion labels and the players wanting to emulate that.”
Katie Cousins, an analyst at Shore Capital who specialises in the gaming sector, said: “If you want to get a message over to this younger demographic, then rather than putting a billboard on the Tube, you can work with the gaming industry to place advertisements in a subtle way that doesn’t affect gameplay and isn’t an advert that you are forced to watch. I think we’ll see more of this kind of advertisement within games.”
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Some 46 per cent of gamers are female, according to Edward East, chief executive of the influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. The pandemic has pushed more people into trying out gaming, with 8.6 million new players coming to the sector in the UK last year.
“Gaming remains a critical and under-leveraged segment for marketers to tap into,” East added.
However, Cousins said that video game publishers needed to make sure they did not take their fashion endorsements too far. “I think you have to be a bit careful if you’re playing a game and every turn you make, there’s an advertisement that will affect the gameplay,” she said. “So developers and publishers will have to be careful to make sure it doesn’t impact the fun of it.”