Couture and Code: Recounting Demna’s Gaming Renaissance at Balenciaga
As Demna draws the curtains on his time at Balenciaga, his video game projects will be remembered as some of his boldest work.
When I visited the Cristóbal Balenciaga Museum last year in Getaria, Spain, it struck me that Cristóbal wasn’t just a couturier, he was a coder in his own right. Not of computers, but of silhouettes. He hacked the silhouette of the 20th-century woman the way a developer might debug a stubborn software system. He treated fabric like source code - refining, reducing, compiling until nothing remained but pure, elegant architecture. He invented volumes that felt as if they were “rendered in 3D” before the saying even existed.
Cristóbal Balenciaga set the house standard for defying convention. And Demna, decades later, would detonate it.
If Cristóbal was the architect of couture’s golden ratio, Demna was its modder—pulling apart the original build, installing new source code, and uploading patch notes in the form of heeled Crocs and Lays crisps handbags. His vision of luxury didn’t just challenge the system; it hacked it from within. And nowhere was this more evident than in his decision to render Balenciaga not just as a brand, but as a playable universe.
Video games became an unexpected tool within Demna’s Pandora's box of luxury fashion at Balenciaga. This is his disc-ography.
Disc One: Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow (2020)
As fashion’s metaverse buzzword era hit warp speed, Demna dropped Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, a browser-based video game that doubled as Balenciaga’s Fall 2021 show and tripled as a sci-fi fever dream set in 2031. Forget livestreams and awkward Zoom runways. Players loaded in, picked a path, and walked through a bleak-but-beautiful universe of chrome-clad forest ravers, dystopian boutiques, and post-apocalyptic Joan of Arcs stomping around in armor boots and NASA-branded carryalls. It was Skyrim, if the quest reward was a sequinned dragon-scale gown.
Built on Unreal Engine and powered by volumetric scans of 50 models, Afterworld wasn’t a gimmick, it was Demna’s playable manifesto. It was a free-to-play fantasy, but with runway logic and ironic PS5 merch drops along the way. It felt less like a lookbook and more like a Death Stranding takeover of SSENSE.
Disc Two: Fortnite Collaboration (2021)
In 2021, Balenciaga became the first luxury house to officially drop into Fortnite, dressing fan-favourite characters in real runway looks, including the infamous spiked boots from Fall ‘21 and a hoodie-sporting Doggo. The designs weren’t just inspired by Balenciaga collections, they were the collections - 3D scanned down to their stitches and ported into Fortnite.
But the partnership didn’t stop at skins. It came with a full in-game retail loop: a Balenciaga-themed hub, dynamic billboards updating in real time, and an IRL capsule line co-branded with Fortnite. Buy the hoodie in-store, rock it in-game — or vice versa. A Balenciaga fit became a cross-platform parade, priced at 1,000 V-Bucks (roughly $8 USD), making high fashion suddenly more accessible than most battle passes. It wasn’t a Travis Scott-level spectacle, it was something cooler: a stealth drop that turned the item shop into a luxury showroom.
Disc Three: BFRND: The Game (2024)
An 8-bit side-scroller starring BFRND - Balenciaga’s longtime composer, sound architect, and low-key muse - reimagined not as a producer, but as a pixelated protagonist. The game sent players bouncing through glitchy recreations of Balenciaga’s most iconic runway sets: think cavernous voids from the dystopian FW shows, and maybe even a certain muddy pit. Each level was a time capsule rendered in charming low-res nostalgia, like if Castlevania was developed by Rick Owens.
Disc Four: Need for Speed Mobile (2024)
As Demna rounded the final lap of his Balenciaga tenure, he drifted into one last digital detour: Need for Speed: Mobile. But this wasn’t just a pitstop collab - it was a full-throttle fusion of fashion and street racing. Over 500 days in the making, the collab injected Balenciaga’s dysto-sleek sensibility into Tencent’s hypermobile racer. The results? A caution-tape-wrapped supercar straight out of Kim K’s Winter ‘22 bondage dreams. Six avatar fits, four liveries, and city maps peppered with Balenciaga flagship stores, from Bond Street’s brutalist cube to a preview of Shanghai IRL.
GG Demna
In modding culture, the goal isn’t to destroy the original game, it’s to extend it. To take what exists and make it speak to the now. That’s what Demna did to Balenciaga.
Demna’s Balenciaga wasn’t interested in pandering to gamers; it was interested in conversing with them. It assumed the gamer might wear Margiela. That they might enjoy Vangelis, not just vaporwave. And crucially, it challenged the gatekeeping of luxury.
While others saw gamers as a marketing segment, Demna saw them as muses. His was a luxury house that wasn’t afraid to get weird with it.
Critics called it gimmicky, derivative, even heretical. But Demna’s Balenciaga wasn’t a Maison, it was a modded server: rewired, rule-bent, and running on its own patch notes.
If Cristóbal crafted the geometry of elegance, Demna didn’t eradicate it - he uploaded its expansion pack. And as he moves on to Gucci, expect fewer heritage homages (ala Sabato de Sarno) and more jailbreaks of the luxury status quo.
You get the sense he’s not closing a chapter, but booting up a new campaign - same engine, different terrain.