When games are the only fashion in town: Covid-19, Animal Crossing, and the future of fashion

Abstract

The fashion industry is articulated upon the personalities of bodies, the intimacy of the product’s touch and feel, the community of trends and tribes. The effect of Covid-19 has been far-reaching and indiscriminate, not only for the maintenance of the practical and commercial infrastructure of fashion, but also for the very identity of fashion itself. In the first instance there was the very direct response of turning factories over to the production of protective equipment and the positioning of the face mask as a fashion item. The impact of the virus on production, including the closure of factories, has magnified already existing attention on outsourcing and the uncertain welfare of workers in poorer economies manufacturing the bulk of fast fashion. At the same time, slow fashion movements such as luxury rental may never recover. Fundamentally there has also been a transformative shift in fashion’s identity. Fashion struggles with social distance and hoards trending products. Fashion has already been confronting its record on sustainability, but with the impact of the virus, the object of fashion’s commercial model is moving even further away from that of the turnover of the individual product and closer to a discourse of reuse and duration. Ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, the fashion industry has had to reconcile a retail model of selling less product rather than more. Fashion is becoming less ‘eventful’ and the display of fashion’s twenty-first-century boulevardier is increasingly a mediated and virtual presence, rather than a vibrant one. In this respect, the consumer’s belief in the provenance of the fashion product (and the authenticity and assurance of labelling) becomes the object at stake and in transaction, rather than the product itself. The social life of fashion is thus becoming more difficult to recognize but, in many ways, also easier to find. Covid-19 has presented specific challenges to the fashion industry, some well beyond the immediate retail relationship. Not only individual brands, but also to a large extent the industry itself, have been forced to re-position and secure identity and resilience. One particularly extraordinary phenomenon has been the translation of fashion into the fan communities of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the latest release of Nintendo’s social simulation video game series, Animal Crossing. I say extraordinary, but in many ways the fashioning of Animal Crossing and the gaming of fashion were a long time coming.