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The ongoing courtship between luxury brands and the gaming world has taken another significant step forward this week — Balenciaga has become the first luxury brand to partner with Epic Games’ Fortnite.
Even those in the fashion business who don’t play video games will likely know Fortnite. Launched in 2017, the online video game is a true cultural phenomenon with 400 million global users and strong links with the worlds of music and sport.
Now, fashion wants in. Balenciaga has designed four virtual outfits (or “skins”) that players can purchase, alongside accessories, weaponry and a virtual Balenciaga destination in-game (complete with a Balenciaga store). The activation is running for one week from 20 September and has an IRL element: a limited-edition run of Balenciaga x Fortnite hats, T-shirts and hoodies are being sold in Balenciaga stores and on Balenciaga.com.
Balenciaga has proven to be a luxury pioneer in the gaming arena. “Our partnership with Epic Games didn’t start with Fortnite, actually,” says Demna Gvasalia, artistic director at Balenciaga. “It started with our own first video game, Afterworld, which we built using [Epic Games’s proprietary 3D design technology] Unreal Engine to debut our Autumn 2021 collection.”
A new marketing metaverse
Brands want to tap Gen Z through 2.7 billion gamers worldwide, particularly via activations that straddle both the digital and physical worlds. Louis Vuitton partnered with League of Legends in 2019 on both virtual and physical clothing, while Gucci partnered with Roblox on a virtual world in May this year.
The Fortnite collaboration with Balenciaga comes in the wake of a string of high-profile collabs in music and sport. In 2020, Travis Scott’s virtual concert on Fortnite attracted 45 million concurrent views. Other collaborations have included America’s NFL (National Football League) and NBA (National Basketball Association) as well as Walt Disney-owned Marvel.
Epic has been weighing luxury partnerships for some time, says partnerships lead Emily Levy. Balenciaga was judged a good fit for this first fashion collaboration because of its existing work in the metaverse.
Afterworld, Balenciaga’s proprietary game, launched in December 2020, has used volumetric capture and 3D virtual design to construct a dystopian Balenciaga world, with photorealistic outfits. “From there, we have continued to be inspired by the creativity of Unreal and Fortnite communities,” Gvasalia says. “It made total sense to me that we collaborate further by creating these authentic Balenciaga looks for Fortnite and a new physical Fortnite clothing series for our stores.”
Epic Games revenue hit $5.1 billion in 2020, driven by Fortnite and the sale of in-game currency V-Bucks, used to purchase skins, accessories and emotes (actions). Balenciaga skins are priced at 1000 V-Bucks which equates to approximately $8 dollars, intended to remain accessible for all players.
In April 2020, high-profile Fortnite player Lachlan staged a Fortnite fashion show in the game, where players could enter and show off their skins. The video has had 11 million views on YouTube and underlined the appetite for fashion in the Fortnite ecosystem, says Levy.
The growth of Creative Mode
Fortnite was initially best known for Battle Royale, a game mode where players fight 1 versus 100. However, the user base has evolved over the last four years, Levy says. Now 50 per cent of players are spending their time in Fortnite Creative Mode, exploring different virtual experiences and creating their own virtual worlds. “We have lots of different people within our community. So we know that fashion is of interest,” says Levy. At present, brands cannot sell items on Fortnite independently. Fashion activations in the game are more about market awareness — reaching a hard-to-target audience of “young, enthusiastic, digital, native folks”, as Alan Cooper, director, product and consumer communications at Epic Games, puts it.
For Balenciaga, the project shows that its involvement in the metaverse is emerging as a strategic pillar of its business, rather than a one-off marketing ploy. For Epic Games, a benefit of the collaboration is to raise awareness of Unreal Engine, Epic’s real-time 3D design development software, which has applications beyond gaming in architecture, film and fashion. Unreal and competitor engine Unity (from Unity Technologies) allow users to 3D render virtual worlds in real time, a relatively new development that is shaking up the design world. There’s a real race to find talented Unreal and Unity developers right now, says futurist and metaverse expert Cathy Hackl — the technology is advancing so quickly, universities haven’t yet caught up.
“It's important for us to show the dynamic range of Unreal Engine,” says Cooper. Physical 3D billboards of the Balenciaga collaboration, rendered using Unreal, are being featured in major cities such as New York and Tokyo, intended to catch the eye of people unfamiliar with Fortnite and build buzz.
Fashion brands might use Unreal to produce a fundamental set of assets around a collection and transpose them into the physical world or other types of digital experiences. “You can establish a unified asset pipeline from production and design and prototyping all the way down to marketing,” says Cooper. “You could put your clothing or your car or whatever into a platform like Fortnite or into a 3D billboard, cutting down all of the systems that currently exist between all of those stations.”
There’s also an opportunity for brands to tap into the creativity of the Fortnite community to help them create garments or virtual activations, says Cooper. “We are seeing very large, significant brands begin to realise that they don't need to necessarily partner with Epic at the Travis Scott or Ariana Grande level, creating massive worlds. They can actually work with the existing Fortnite creator community. Brands can commission our players to create for them. We can work to kind of help shepherd that.”
More collaborations are likely, although Epic won’t divulge any details just yet. “We're just getting started,” Levy says. “We're pushing the boundaries of what it means to bring culture into the game.”
Cooper hopes the Balenciaga collaboration will stir up interest in the luxury fashion sector. “Some of this, I think, is important just from a proof-of-concept perspective,” he says. “[We want] to really inspire the industry and show what we can do here.”
Maghan McDowell also contributed reporting to this story.
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