Fashion and Game Design as Hybrid Practices: Approaches in Eduction to Creating Fashion-Related Experiences in Digital Worlds

This research emerged from a collaborative workshop with design researchers in digital game design. The gained insights led to exploring fashion and digital game design as hybrid practices and considering how higher education in fashion design might better prepare students to create meaningful fashion-related experiences in digital worlds. While collaborations between fashion brands and game developers are increasingly visible, they often result in digital garments that replicate physical fashion rather than fully utilising the experiential and narrative capacities of digital environments. 

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Drawing on in-depth interviews with experts from fashion design, digital game development, and adjacent hybrid practices, the research reveals fundamental differences in how garments are conceived across disciplines. In fashion design, digital tools are commonly used to prototype physical products, with garments treated as finished objects applied to pre-defined bodies. In contrast, game character designers develop body and dress simultaneously as a unified, dynamic entity, where clothing functions not only as visual expression but also as a narrative, performative, and interactive element within a game world.

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The findings highlight the need for hybrid designers capable of mediating between these disciplinary logics. Such practitioners possess an understanding of both the socio-cultural meaning-making central to fashion and the technical, systemic, and experiential requirements of digital worlds. Hybrid competence enables garments to be designed as mutable assets that respond to gameplay, narrative progression, and player identity rather than as static representations of physical clothing.

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The findings further suggest that higher education in fashion design needs to move beyond software-specific training and digital replicas of physical practice, and advocates for pedagogical frameworks that embrace shared digital tools, open workflows, and interdisciplinary collaboration with digital-native design disciplines. By reframing digital garments as experiential and context-dependent rather than product-oriented, the research positions fashion design education as a key site for cultivating new forms of digital expression that operate across physical and virtual realms, expanding the future scope of fashion practice. 

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Authors: Jan Tepe, Saina Koohnavard