Alas, Clothes Can’t Compete With Video Games
The New York Times
A fashion show in Paris was staged against a backdrop of 200 people playing Fortnite together. It was a distraction, at best.
The models whooshed by in slinky pants, sailor tops, and finger-toed sneakers, but my seatmate noticed none of it. He was too busy blasting his way up the leaderboard in Fortnite. A triangular tube-top shooting flames could’ve gone by and this man would’ve continued hammering on his computer keyboard like Liberace at the piano.
On Sunday evening in Paris, Coperni, a French fashion label with a yen for stunty events, staged a fashion show conjoined — admirably, if oddly — with a 200-person LAN party. (Short for local area network, this now-largely archaic method of online gaming has people commune in one space to play a video game together on a shared network.)
Coperni’s runway was set against four rows of gamers, their faces aglow in the twitchy green light of computer monitors as they swerved around Fortnite’s digital world in Hummer-looking trucks, and fired guns at each other.
When the show began, the players kept at it, the clicky sounds of their keystrokes competing with the percussive taps of the model’s heels striking the floor of the cavernous Adidas Arena.
The concept, said Coperni’s co-founder Arnaud Vaillant, was “a tribute to gaming in general and to celebrate this subculture from the ’90s.”
Still, there was no real crossover in the two proceedings. Coperni’s fur jackets weren’t playable via joystick. The video game had zilch to do with dresses. There wasn’t really a grand message here about the inescapability of tech. It was two spectacles, wedged beside each other to make something newly chaotic.
