Discover the Fashion Design Hidden Inside Online Game Worlds

I came to video games late and slightly against my will. A younger cutter in the last atelier I worked in used to sketch armor from a fantasy game on the back of our pattern paper, and I told her more than once that it was a waste of good paper. Then she showed me what she was actually doing. She was working out how a shoulder piece would sit over a gathered sleeve, and where the seam would need to fall so the whole thing could move. That is a dressmaking problem. I stopped complaining about the paper.

Since then I have spent a fair amount of time looking at the clothes inside online game worlds with the same eye I use on a garment rail. What I found is that there is real fashion design hidden in there, often better than it needs to be, and most players walk past it without noticing.

Game costumes are designed, not decorated

A common assumption is that game clothing is drawn by someone who simply makes things look cool. In bigger studios, that is rarely how it works. Character outfits go through concept art, reference gathering, revisions and technical checks, a process that looks a lot like a small collection being developed. The designer has a brief: who this person is, where they live, what they do all day, how much money they have. The clothes answer those questions.

Look at the townspeople in Red Dead Redemption 2, set in 1899. The women in towns wear long skirts, fitted bodices and high collars that track the period closely, and the rural characters wear faded, patched versions of the same shapes. Nobody in the story stops to explain it. The clothes simply tell you who has money and who has been walking in the same dress for a year. That is exactly the kind of storytelling a costume department does for a period film.

The Witcher 3 is another example people mention to me. Its villagers wear layered wool and linen in muted earth colors, with aprons, headscarves and simple belts. The nobles in the southern region dress in brighter colors and finer cuts. You can read the economy of the world from the hems.

Where the real fashion houses walked in

For years the fashion industry treated games as something for teenagers. That changed quietly, then quite loudly. Moschino released a capsule collection tied to The Sims in 2019. Louis Vuitton designed outfits for League of Legends the same year, including a prestige look for one of its characters. Balenciaga appeared in Fortnite in 2021 with digital outfits based on its own pieces.

I will be honest about my reaction to some of these. A few were marketing more than design, a logo pasted onto an existing body. But the better collaborations treated the game character as a client with a real body and a real life, and they adapted the cut accordingly. That is the part that interested me. A digital character has proportions no human has, and the designers had to decide which rules of tailoring to keep and which to throw away.

The rules game designers keep, and the ones they break

When I study a well designed game outfit, I see four habits a tailor would recognise immediately.

1. Silhouette first. Game characters are often seen small, from far away, in motion. The outline has to read instantly. A good costume designer exaggerates the shape slightly, a wider skirt, a sharper shoulder, so it holds up on screen.
2. Value contrast. Light against dark tells the eye where to go. Many game outfits keep the face and upper body in the lightest tones and push the darker colors to the lower half, the same trick used in a summer dress with a pale bodice and a deeper skirt.
3. Believable closures. The better studios show you where the garment opens. Buttons, lacing, a wrap that ties at the waist. When an outfit has no visible way to get into it, it looks like a costume rather than clothing.
4. Weight that matches material. A linen tunic should hang and crease differently from a wool coat. Modern games increasingly get this right, which my colleague Hana covers in how fabric and texture are drawn in modern gaming.

What they break is mostly practicality. Nobody in a game needs pockets, and nobody needs a skirt that survives sitting on a bus. Capes can float. Sleeves can be impossibly wide. I used to find this irritating. Now I see it as a sketchbook without consequences, which is something every dressmaker secretly wants.

Why I disagree that game fashion is pure fantasy

The usual line is that game clothing has nothing to teach because it ignores physics and real bodies. I hear it from colleagues in fashion and, oddly, from some players too.

It is only half true. Yes, there are floating capes and armor that would crush a real shoulder. But underneath the spectacle, most game outfits are built on very old clothing ideas: the empire waist, the wrap dress, the tunic over trousers, the fitted bodice with a full skirt. These are shapes that have survived centuries because they are comfortable and flattering on a wide range of bodies. Game designers reach for them because they are easy to read, and in doing so they keep showing millions of players what a good basic shape looks like.

I have watched a young woman in a fitting room point at a dress on my rail and say it looked like something her character wore in a game. She did not know the term empire waist. She knew the shape, and she knew it suited her. That is not fantasy. That is education by accident.

How to look at game clothes with a designer's eye

If you play, try this the next time you are standing in a town or a hub area. Instead of looking at the main characters, look at the background people. They are usually where the most careful costume work lives, because they have to suggest an entire society in a few seconds.

• Notice the hem lengths. Shorter, practical hems usually belong to workers. Floor length usually means wealth or ceremony.
• Look at the colors by class. Dyed, saturated colors were historically expensive, and many games quietly respect that.
• Find the fastening. If you can see how the garment closes, the designer was thinking like a tailor.
• Check how the fabric moves when the character walks. Stiff, slow movement suggests heavy cloth. Quick, fluttering movement suggests something light.

Doing this for a while trains your eye in a way that carries over to a real shop. You start to see why one linen dress hangs well and another, with almost the same pattern, looks shapeless. Often it is a centimetre of shoulder width or the angle of a side seam, the kind of thing game artists fuss over too.

A small exercise for this week

Pick one game outfit you like and try to describe it in plain dressmaking terms: the neckline, the waist position, the skirt shape, the fabric you think it represents. Then look through your own wardrobe for the closest real equivalent. You might find you already own the shape, and you might find the reason you like that character is the same reason you keep reaching for one particular dress. If you want more of these comparisons, the Games section holds the rest of our notes, and the Fabrics section explains the real cloth behind the pixels.