Authors: Michele Varini
Abstract
This study analyses the interaction between fashion and digital technologies, focusing on virtual environments such as video games. Traditionally, fashion has played a strong role in defining social classes, genders, body ideals and identities. With the advent of the digital, these dynamics have changed, amplified and extended beyond the physical world. Using netnography and visual ethnography, this research aims to examine how four extremely popular multiplayer video games (League of Legends, Apex Legends, Overwatch 2 and Valorant) represent bodies and genders, to explore whether traditional mainstream fashion models are reflected or, conversely, transformed. By examining official content produced by gaming platforms, the research seeks to trace how representations of body and gender are conveyed in a top-down manner, similar to traditional fashion communication. This investigation highlights the hybrid relationship between fashion, gaming and media, in which the boundaries between material and non-material, online and offline, constantly shift. The study also considers how the pandemic has transformed the ways in which consumers engage with digital fashion, making this area of exploration increasingly relevant.
Keywords: Digital Fashion, Digital Methods, Visual Methods, Body representation; Gaming
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13131/unipi/eywy-0853
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MICHELE VARINI is PhD in Sociology, Organisations, Cultures, at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He work on digital fashion issues: the hybridisation between the world of gaming and of fashion production. A collaborator of the ModaCult study centre, he is interested in digitalisation, digital fashion, new forms of production and consumption, and post-humanism.
Email: michele.varini@unicatt.it