3D Fashion Deep Dive 08: Fashion’s New Playground
Virtual Style Inside Games
Last week, I talked about virtual try-on and why I’ve started to de-emphasize it as the “holy grail” application of 3D in fashion in a Realtime environment.
That shift surprised me, because for a long time virtual try-on felt inevitable. Garments already exist in 3D. Brands want to reduce returns. Customers want confidence. The logic seems airtight.
But after spending more time inside real fashion workflows and going deeper into real-time rendering and interactive systems, I’ve come to a different conclusion: anything short of true photorealism doesn’t meaningfully outperform a high-quality photo or a well-crafted digital twin when it comes to purchase confidence. And the gap between where mobile real-time tech is today and where it would need to be to fully close that loop is still massive.
What has caught my attention over the last few years, though, is something else entirely. It’s quieter. Less talked about in traditional fashion circles. And already delivering real value at real scale.
Fashion inside games.
Not as a speculative metaverse future. Not as NFTs-first nonsense. But as a functioning, revenue-generating ecosystem that millions of people already care deeply about.
Virtual Worlds, Real Audiences, Real Money
If you’re not a gamer, it’s easy to underestimate how large and culturally important platforms like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft actually are.
These aren’t niche experiences. They’re massive, social, identity-driven worlds where self-expression matters and clothing and skins are one of the primary ways people express themselves.
In Fortnite, cosmetics aren’t an afterthought. They’re central to the experience. Players spend real money to customize how they look, not because it helps them win, but because it helps them be seen. Epic’s leadership has said it plainly: Fortnite is fashion.
And the numbers back that up. Fortnite has generated tens of billions of dollars in revenue almost entirely through cosmetic purchases. Players routinely spend $100+ a year on skins, emotes, and accessories in a game that is otherwise free.
Roblox is an even more interesting case. Its daily active user count is enormous, and while the audience skews younger today, those users are growing up with digital self-expression as a given. They aren’t “trying on” virtual fashion as a novelty…it’s just how identity works in that space.
What really matters here isn’t just scale, but behavior. People don’t passively consume these worlds. They socialize in them. They show off. They develop reputations. And the clothes their avatars wear are part of that identity.
That’s why stories like the Gucci bag on Roblox don’t actually surprise me anymore. When a virtual accessory sells for more than its physical counterpart, it’s not because people are irrational. It’s because value is contextual. Inside that world, status and scarcity still matter — sometimes more than physical
Minecraft, in its own way, laid the groundwork for all of this. Long before brand activations, people were customizing skins, building identity through pixels, and forming social groups where who you were in the game mattered as much as who you were offline. For a lot of kids, their most consistent self-expression didn’t come from what they wore to school and it came from their avatar.
Once you see that, it becomes very hard to dismiss digital fashion as a gimmick.
Fashion Brands Are Paying Attention Now
For a long time, fashion brands treated games like marketing stunts. A short-term activation. A PR moment.
That’s changing.
One of my favorite moments last year happened during a panel I was hosting at SIGGRAPH on 3D careers beyond entertainment. We were talking about fashion, real-time workflows, and where things were heading. During the Q&A, a senior digital leader from a major global fashion brand stood up and said, very directly, that they were actively interested in getting their garments into Fortnite.
Not a vague “metaverse exploration.” A clear intent.
Jonathan Windbush, who was on the panel with me and is one of my all-time favorites, didn’t hesitate. He jumped in and pitched his services right there from the stage. It was a perfect real-time demo of both the value of these workflows and the importance of recognizing an opportunity the moment it shows up…even if you’re literally in the middle of presenting.
Fashion brands aren’t asking if this space matters anymore. They’re asking how to enter it.
And the early examples show why. Balenciaga’s Fortnite collaboration wasn’t just skins; it was a fully connected physical and digital drop. Gucci’s Roblox experience wasn’t just branding, it created real resale value. Nike’s Roblox activations attracted millions of users in months, not years.
These aren’t ads. They’re experiences people willingly participate in.
What’s important here is that gaming platforms already understand things fashion has struggled to replicate digitally: self-expression, scarcity, social visibility, and emotional attachment to virtual goods.
This Is Where 3D Artists Have a Massive Advantage
Here’s the part I keep coming back to.
The skillsets required to succeed in virtual fashion inside games already exist. They just don’t live in traditional fashion teams.
Real-time optimization. Modular assets. Scalable pipelines. Fast iteration. Understanding what reads well in motion instead of under studio lighting. Designing for performance and personality.
That’s home turf for game artists.
At the same time, many fashion-native 3D workflows stop short of real-time. CLO and Browzwear are incredible for design and development, but they aren’t built for interactive environments at scale. Meanwhile, a lot of game artists don’t think about garments, fit logic, or fashion aesthetics at all.
The overlap is still surprisingly rare.
That’s why you see independent Roblox creators building seven-figure businesses selling virtual apparel. They understand the platform, the audience, and the production constraints. They release frequent “collections.” They track trends. They treat it like streetwear, not couture.
And they don’t wait for permission.
If I were a 3D artist early in my career today, I’d be paying very close attention to this space. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s already functioning. The infrastructure exists. The audience exists. The money exists.
And brands are just starting to realize they need help.
Scarcity, Status, and the Quiet Return of Digital Ownership
We can’t talk about virtual fashion without touching on scarcity.
Luxury has always been about more than materials. It’s about exclusivity. Digital goods struggle with that because they’re infinitely copyable.
Games have solved this partially through time-based drops, limited availability, and platform-controlled scarcity. That’s why certain skins signal status even if millions exist and they say something about when and how you acquired them.
NFTs tried to formalize this with ownership and provable scarcity, and then promptly burned themselves to the ground through speculation and hype. But underneath the noise, the core idea is still valid: people want to own digital things in meaningful ways.
I don’t think the next phase of this will look like the last one. It won’t be JPEGs and crypto bros. It’ll be quieter. More integrated. Possibly invisible to the end user.
But the desire for limited, ownable digital fashion isn’t going away. The Gucci Roblox bag already proved that.
Why I Think This Matters More Than Virtual Try-On
Here’s my big takeaway.
Virtual try-on is about accuracy. Games are about identity.
Fashion has always lived at the intersection of function and expression. Virtual try-on focuses heavily on the former. Gaming environments lean hard into the latter and that’s where emotional value lives.
People don’t just want to know how something fits. They want to signal who they are.
Games already do that at scale.
So when I think about the future of 3D in fashion, I’m less interested in replacing the fitting room and far more interested in how digital garments live, move, and mean something inside real-time worlds.
That’s where the momentum is. That’s where the audience already is. And that’s where a lot of fashion’s next growth stories are going to come from.
The next Virgil Abloh might not come from a runway. They might come from a game engine.
One last deep dive coming soon!
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Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
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