LAN stans: How Fashion Keeps Coming Back to the Local Area Network
In collaboration with The Face
The original article appears here on The Face.
Martine Rose just wandered into a 1999 Counter Strike internet café and turned it into her atelier.
Her new Nike collection looks like something pulled from a dial-up fever dream: comfy tracksuits built for hours of chair swivelling, remixed SS15 clobber from her own brand, new Shox trainer colourways, and of course, reimagined football kits in three colourways to keep things cool in a room of overheated PCs. “We started looking at nineties LAN parties where teenagers would take PCs to each other’s houses for all night gaming sessions, where they would watch each other play. When we were looking at the research images, it was very much tracksuits and comfortable silhouettes,” says Rose. Martine has joined the LAN party, and she’s not the only one on the server.
Earlier this year, Coperni ditched the classic runway and hosted a swathe of gamers for a LAN party instead, where the collection was unveiled and amplified by the screen glow of numerous monitors. Guests were seated between 200 gamers playing Fortnite, as Amelia Gray and Iris Law weaved in and out of players inside the Adidas Arena. Back in 2020, Vetements x Reebok styled an entire drop around the same concept. Somewhere between irony and sincerity, fashion has discovered an unexpected interest: the LAN party.
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The Church of Ethernet
For the uninitiated, a LAN party – short for Local Area Network – was a popular form of multiplayer gaming in the ’90s/’00s. Friends would lug their CRT monitors over, tangled in a web of Ethernet cables, and spend entire weekends connected through spaghetti wiring, sugar highs and mutual sleep deprivation.
LAN parties were equally chaotic and iconic. It gave birth to internet legends like the Duct-Tape Gamer. Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs even threw their own LAN party on the plane flight home from winning the 1999 NBA Finals. Ain’t no party like a LAN party.
In the dim glow of cathode rays, players formed micro-societies. Someone always knew how to troubleshoot the modem. Someone always broke it. Rivalries, alliances, a dozen friends sharing bandwidth and banter, all within the four walls of a living room. It’s easy to see why fashion’s falling for it. The LAN party aesthetic is aggressively unglamorous: towers humming, cords snaking across the carpet, snack debris everywhere, niche jokes. But that’s exactly its allure. These messy environments provide inspiration to brands like Martine Rose, Coperni and Vetements that have always looked to the unexpected corners of culture for source material.
Beyond the visual mess, there’s philosophy in it. A LAN party is built on connection. Literal cables, but also the emotional kind. “It’s this sort of democracy of gaming that I really like, anyone can play; if you’re good enough, you’re just good enough. It doesn’t matter your age, background, gender, there’s no requirement other than that you’re good at your craft. I find that really compelling and inclusive and ultimately inspiring. People find themselves there, they find their people,” says Rose. For fashion houses obsessed with “community” as marketing currency, the metaphor writes itself. Pockets of time spent in less than picture-perfect hangouts have become a rarity in today’s climate of TikTok-perfectly curated videos and aesthetically pleasing social media haunts. What’s a LAN party if not a prototype for an invite-only launch event? Same exclusivity, slightly different snacks perhaps. Although, if anyone is going to turn Cheetos into a small plate dish, it’s Vetements.
Did You Try Turning It Off & On Again?
By the mid-2000s, broadband internet and publisher-hosted servers made the LAN party obsolete. Why haul twenty kilos of hardware when you can just log on from home? The gatherings shrank, the modems stuttered, and the world moved to broadband. Multiplayer went massive, but something was lost. The side-eye glances, the shared lag, the warmth of ten central processing units (the computer’s brain) overheating in unison.
And now, LAN culture is experiencing a renaissance.
In the age of fiber optics and online fatigue, people are nostalgic for proximity. Gamers who grew up on Discord are rediscovering the joy of actually sitting next to someone. Lightweight monitors, gaming laptops, and portable routers mean hosting a LAN party today is as easy as texting “bring Haribo’s.”
On a bigger level, conventions like DreamHack – a renowned global gaming festival – continue to attract tens of thousands of gamers to join one big LAN party annually. And Esports training and competition facilities often use LAN networks to keep their face-offs in house and minimise latency.
It’s no surprise that Martine Rose and Coperni have chosen the LAN Party in 2025 as muse, riding its redemption arc. “I’ve always been interested in finding the corners of mainstream cultures and shining a light on that and this was an opportunity to do that. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot,” says Rose. Forever the subcultural scaler, she has clashed the mass and niche together, pairing Esports titans like Ana (Counter Strike champion) with arcade legends like Billy Mitchell (previous record holder of the highest ever Donkey Kong score). “The casting process was really similar, we worked with Isabel Bush again, and we wanted to get a range of different gamers from all backgrounds and who played different styles of games. We ultimately wanted to represent as many different people as possible.”
The visuals move between gamer-mag cover stars to snaring ethernet cables as shoe displays. She treats the LAN party as both an artifact and allegory. It’s about tech with fingerprints. Human error as aesthetic. A reminder that the best networks aren’t always wireless.
Beyond The Basement: Where to Next for Fashion?
The LAN party could be just one checkpoint in a much bigger game. The idea of multiplayer – couch co-ops, arcade meets – is an under-explored territory.
The industry has done many other things when it comes to games, with Balenciaga perhaps being the best example. The maison creates their own platform runners with BFRND, they’ve turned a runway into a role playing game with Afterworld: The Age Of Tomorrow, they’ve referenced Candy Crush in their lookbooks. But most of these projects exist as isolated experiences. None fully embraced the sweaty, joyful absurdity of people actually playing together. “It’s a new lens of how we view sport, I’m interested in expanding that lens,” says Rose.
Imagine a runway show crossed with a couch co-op session. Or a pop-up built like an Akihabara games arcade, each machine skinned and reimagined to mimic an SS26 show. The logic of multiplayer is simple: participation is the product.
Because honestly, the “drinks and DJ” showcase formula is boring. Audiences want to interact, munch a burger and moan about the jobs they hate but won’t quit with a controller in their clutches. The LAN party’s revival isn’t nostalgia, it’s blueprint. Proof that connection can still be physical, funny, and a bit awkward. In the end, fashion’s latest crush on LAN culture isn’t about the clothes necessarily. It’s about the company it creates. And as any gamer will tell you, the match is much more dynamic when everyone’s in the same room.
Officially a LAN stan