Why Luxury Is Getting Back Into Gaming

For Coach, gaming aligns with its core brand values, the brand’s SVP of global visual experience Giovanni Zaccariello says. “This is our way to connect with Gen Z emotionally online,” he says. “But we’re not just partnering with any game for the sake of being into gaming. We’ve really been narrowing down on games that allow for self-expression.” The Sims made sense for Coach, Zaccariello says, because users can build their own avatars and looks from scratch, as well as living environments, which opened the door for Gen Z players to interact with their products when they can’t afford them in real life.

“You don’t want to go into an area that’s so personal without having a clear point of view and opportunity to make the experience better for customers,” Wallengren adds. “So I think in fashion, gaming is moving from a moment of hype and one-off statements to a more fully integrated ecosystem that offers Gen Z a cross-reality from what they might experience in-store. It’s a bridge that gives them this dual world of self-expression.”

Wallengren says her team is still in its “experimentation phase” with the gaming collaborations they’ve launched in the last 18 months. But now Coach has validated the community’s appetite for the brand, it’s exploring “how deep to go” with further experiences like full brand worlds, which cost more and require a deeper understanding of each game’s mechanics. “When you think of a holistic brand campaign, launch or strategy, gaming should be there. It shouldn’t be an add-on or a PR thing. This should now be a part of everything that we do,” she says.

Similarly, Balenciaga prioritized the notion of self-expression with its gaming activations in late 2025, which made sense given the brand’s core values of “creativity and innovation”, according to Balenciaga CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli. “Through this partnership [with PUBG] we merge the artistry of fashion with the cultural reach of interactive gaming entertainment and redefine how style and self-expression can exist in virtual worlds,” Gianangeli told Vogue Business over email. Experts say the gaming communities that thrive the most are those where Gen Zs are constantly creating new assets in-game, so brands should be willing to relinquish some control to enable user-led content that’s built upon their visual codes.

Approach gaming as marketing, not the metaverse

Fashion’s previous flirtations were often conflated with the industry’s metaverse experiments, when several brands hired large innovation teams and poured thousands of dollars into headline-grabbing virtual reality activations between 2019 and 2023. Very few of these experiments translated into real revenue gains, however, establishing these innovation teams as some of the first to go during the slowdown that followed.

“When the metaverse was a thing, gaming was a PR play led by innovation teams that could tick the metaverse box,” Hambro says. “But the reality of the situation since, is that it’s now a marketing-led initiative, with completely different objectives. It’s about raw engagement, user time, sales and impressions.” This re-centering on business objectives means that brands should now view gaming as a pure marketing distribution channel, he continues, adding that cost-per-impression is much cheaper in virtual worlds than across traditional social media — in part thanks to the significantly longer dwelling time of sociable online games like Roblox and Fortnite.