French designers Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer, who are big fans of fashion shows and disruptive innovations, wanted to pay tribute to the gaming community. Many of the silhouettes in their fall-winter 2025-26 collection were inspired by computer connectors and iconic video game characters such as Lara Croft and Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid).
After Disneyland Paris, its theme park, its princesses and its wicked queens, it was time for the Matrix, its computer hackers with long coats and sunglasses, but also its screens lit up at night.
This is essentially what we could feel this Sunday, March 9th, in the Adidas Arena, when Coperni invited 200 gamers to his fall-winter 2025-26 fashion show, giving the event the feel of a LAN Party (Local Area Network Party), a video game tournament that was very popular in the 1990s and early 2000s.
LAN parties and nostalgia
In an era still characterized by the open internet and the absence of social networks, LAN parties (Local Area Network Party) prefigured the current era of hyperconnectivity and massively multiplayer games.
These underground social gatherings allowed players to connect their computers to a shared network in order to play multiplayer video games together in the same physical space.
Usually taking place in the late afternoon, these screen-based evenings saw participants sleeping on site, making do with takeaway pizzas and energy drinks to keep them going.
To summon up this memory of the “first online era now forgotten, a time of discovery and human connection”, Coperni invited amateur and professional players from the French esports team Gentle Mates.
In total, 200 players sat down alongside guests from the virtual world, such as influencer Léna Situation, singer Bilal Hassani and rapper Ice Spice.
They competed in Fortnite and Rocket League, two of the most popular online multiplayer games, all published by Epic Games, the label behind the gaming juggernaut League of Legends.
The parade took place along rows of desktop PCs with flashing screens. Other favorites of hardcore gamers, gaming towers with their integrated cooling system were the other sources of light in a show that Neo from the Matrix saga would not have disowned.
Polymorphic creatures
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Featured photo: © Coperni
