It was the early 2000s, I was eleven and living with my grandmother in Missouri for the summer. The rubber bands around my braces were a little purple and I had just developed my first addiction: drag-and-drop dress-up games. Initially wanting to avoid the muggy St. Louis summer, I holed up in my grandmother’s computer room, an obscene spatial luxury for someone who grew up in a converted bedroom in New York. The computer room was also the gym and also connected to the basement via a laundry chute that I screamed into for fun. (It was St. Louis, there wasn’t much to do.) These games – which as far as I knew at the time were the entire Internet – had a very simple premise. There, on the screen, was a half-naked doll that you could both customize and, you guessed it, dress up. These flash games often had a theme: you could dress up an off-brand version of a Disney princess, or Miss Americana, or a fairy. I was a tween video game junkie.
These games were a free space where the mind could wander without judgment or approval from others. They had no plot, no competition, no tête-à-tête with other fans, just endless options to switch between. You didn’t have to defend your personal style, or even have one. There were no bets. It was all the wonder of playing with your favorite doll without the annoyance of losing a single Barbie shoe, or the realization that once their hair was cut, it would never grow back.
It was also a way to continue childhood play as you transitioned into teenage life. At that age, my dolls were shoved in a box under my bed because playing with Barbies was for babies, but there I was still playing with dolls, only this time in cute miniskirts. My hobbies included writing in my diary, spending hours looking at clothes online and daydreaming. What would I be like when I was older? I wondered, somehow out of breath from sitting in front of the computer and scrolling through different hairstyles, what I would wear if I had more than $100 in withheld bat mitzvah money (money I need to get to the see today). What would I be like?
For the current crop of Gen-Z fashion writers and creators, now in their mid-20s, these games were a formative early experience with the internet’s potential to expand what fashion can be. Fashion writer Alexandra Hildreth didn’t know she wanted to work in fashion until she was 20, but there were always signs. “I remember playing games like My Scene on the family desktop when the Internet was still populated by single-interest websites and forums that let you dig into your coming-of-age aesthetic obsessions, And edit your digital doll’s fall coat collection,” she says. “It was all so intensely curatorial but personal, how could that not lead to fashion?”