When I think ‘Diablo,’ I think ‘fashion’. Between the unmatched zaddy energy of Deckard Cain and the effortless drip of the necromancer, it’s both a crime and a mystery that the fashion world has so far turned a blind eye to the sartorial perfection of Blizzard’s beloved ARPG series. Well, no longer. A recent tour de force at Milan Fashion Week, which concludes today, has finally made the obvious match with a show “inspired by the dark side and complimentary conflict” of Diablo 4.
The clothes were designed by Danish fashion house Han Kjøbenhavn, and centred around a theme of “hell as a beautiful place”. The brand’s creative director, Jannik Wikkelsø Davidsen, said the match-up between the fashion company and Blizzard was a natural one, and it was their shared “emotional DNA” that compelled him to swaddle an innocent supermodel in a chrome(?) recreation of the Olympic flame.
The featured clothing makes use of all sorts of materials—vegan leather, faux fur, chrome, and pearls—to tell a fashion story that tries to “mirror the journey within Diablo as well as my own journey,” Davidsen told NME. In other interviews, he’s mentioned that he deliberately set out to avoid creating a “one-to-one” imitation of in-game skins, instead trying to “translate emotion into something that can exist within our world”. That’s a pretty generous definition of “can exist within our world,” if you ask me. The neighbourhood children would run me out of my home if I started caping about town in some of this stuff.
I have to admit the whole thing seems a bit baffling to me, but I still buy my socks at Tesco and probably shouldn’t be allowed an opinion on anything. It’s all very fashion, but doesn’t seem enormously Diablo? I don’t know which elements of the seminal ARPG series are encapsulated by draping some ethereal, reed-like being in the remains of a fishing net and sending them to Italy, but I fully cop to being out of my element on this one.
That’s not to say I’m down on the whole thing, though. I’m a fan of the ultra-modern, form-fitting leather-and-rubber ensembles that you can see in the gallery below. It’s just that, to me, it looks a lot more like something out of Vampire: the Masquerade than Diablo. If you told me these shots were from an upcoming visual novel about hyper-chic Tzimisces and Toreadors, I’d absolutely believe you.
The so-called “ready-to-wear” outfits will, notionally, be converted to something “more everyday wearable” in the future, because why should words mean anything? It’ll happen in summer this year, just in time for Diablo 4 to finally release on June 6. I expect to see all true Diablo fans dressed in appropriately hyper-fashionable outfits the second these works of art hit store shelves.
