Dress-up games are so popular that perhaps every child has tried dressing up, for fun or out of curiosity, in their youth. In fact, self-reflection of this kind probably predates written history; Barbie was hardly the first doll humankind had ever made, after all. And while naturally girls are the most enthusiastic practitioners of fashion and its wares, boys are by no means safe from its charms: well into their adult years, boys will color their hair, choose different styles (punk, gangster, etc.) and find favorite kinds of clothes in spite of themselves.
From birth, girls are trained by themselves and by the outside world to have an eye for fashion, especially their own. Cultivating their own look is a delicate balancing act between what may be judged by their peers and what they truly believe is beautiful or stylish, and in this way, many girls need a lot of courage to carry out what’s really a very brave thing! While fashion is extremely fun and satisfying, perhaps because of how much we like to look our best, it can also be a difficult and tricky thing, with classmates and friends constantly appraising your chosen clothes or styles.
The magic of the Internet is that no longer is money any object for the aspiring girl looking to try out new outfits, and no longer does she need to go through painful years of gathering artistic skills and experience so she can draw prospective designs in her notebook. Dress-up games have translated to the digital world with aplomb and panache! The plate rubbings, coloring books and Barbie dolls of your childhood have all been condensed into one extremely convenient, simple and yet very much fun format. The basic dress-up game takes the form of a doll (who often you can yourself customize to better resemble yourself) with a massive selection of pixilated clothes, from which you can drag-and-drop your choices onto the doll’s body, creating an outfit piece by piece. Each game often has an individual theme, like the seasons, or fairy kingdoms, and there are perhaps an infinite number of these themes!
When we were little, we’d have to steal our older brothers’ and sisters’ clothes, or even our parents’. We didn’t have any money and we could rarely get the latest fashions without a lot of nagging. We had to resort to pen and paper, pencil and stencil. Many of us would even collect the paper cut-out books, which held a certain amount of pre-drawn designs, letting you cut them out and rearrange them as you saw fit. Still some of us would create real doll clothes from spare household items like sellotape and paperclips, using old t-shirts as the material from which to make mini scarves and skirts all of our own. Fortunately, as I’ve said, today’s girl with a passion for fashion doesn’t need to go to such lengths just to translate her dreams into reality. She has the whole of the fashion world laid out for her at her feet (fit snugly into a pair of stylish slippers, of course!)
