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Fashion Embraces Games (FILA X Battlegrounds)
  • October 05, 2018
Fashion Embraces Games (FILA X Battlegrounds)

Collaboration between game production companies and the fashion world is a phenomenon that has been around for longer than you might think. A good example is the modeling debut of Lightning, the protagonist of Final Fantasy XIII, which was developed by Square Enix, a Japanese video game developer. After appearing in Prada's menswear magazine in 2011, Lightning was chosen as a Louis Vuitton model in 2016. When asked about the reason for selecting the game character Lightning as a model, Louis Vuitton's artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière said “Lightning is the perfect avatar for a global, heroic woman, and for a world in which social networks and communications are now seamlessly interwoven with our lives.” As such, fashion companies are actively utilizing game intellectual property (IP), which can be considered a symbol of the virtual world, as a way to keep pace with a modern society in which the boundary between the real and virtual worlds is collapsing, as well as the perceptions of young consumers, who see this trend as a natural part of their daily lives. The Japanese SPA brand UNIQLO has also collaborated with video game companies like Blizzard Entertainment (US) and Capcom (Japan). In Korea, the collaboration between the clothing company FILA and PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS (PUBG) has recently attracted attention. PUBG is an FPS game developed by PUBG Corporation and has become a global hit. This collaboration appears to be a smart attempt by FILA to utilize the popularity of PUBG among customers in their 20s for promotion. Notably, FILA has tried to reflect PUBG’s symbolic items, such as the “Level 3 backpack,” as similarly as possible on its products. The collaboration between the two companies clearly shows the possibility that the collaboration trend in the fashion industry, which had previously been limited to character collaboration, will be expanded to include the use of prominent game IP. A FILA official forecasts a change in the fashion industry’s perspective, saying, “We expect this collaboration to present a new paradigm in the collaboration trend.”