I've always been fascinated by all things fashion. Growing up in the early 2000s meant I was bombarded with dress-up games galore: I was obsessed with Bratz, Dollz Mania pages clogged up my Dad's Firefox bookmarks (sorry Pops), and I've accrued far too many hours in the Style Savvy games on Nintendo DS.
Now I may be approaching 30 at a terrifying rate, but the little fashionista in me has yet to crumble into dust. Dressing up virtual characters is still very much my jam—after all, we know fashion is the real endgame in any game that lets you customise your character. With The Algorithm forever listening, it means I've been fed a ridiculous amount of Dress to Impress clips across all of my social media for months now.
It's one of Roblox's 40 million+ "experiences" and arguably one of its most popular right now, drawing in over 100,000 concurrent users throughout the day and accruing over 2.7 billion visits since releasing in November. If you didn't guess by the name and all my prior rambling, it's a dress-up game where you're handed a theme, given just over five minutes to cobble together an appropriate outfit before walking the runway and busting a few moves to try and really sell your getup. Everyone can rate your outfit out of five stars: get a high enough score and you can land yourself on the podium as the One True Fashionista.
Despite most definitely being marketed to children—as most things on Roblox are—it's also been adopted by streamers, celebrities and other non-famous adults with fully developed brains. I gotta admit I've been curious for a hot sec now, and this week I finally worked up the courage to dive in and try it, steeling myself for the very real possibility of having children telling me I was ugly and had no taste.
Shop 'til you drop
I drop in right on the tail-end of a runway as the theme "Visual Kei" is emblazoned across the top of the screen—think a blend of harajuku and glam rock à la Kiss. Yo, cool, I'm a huge visual kei fan! Except, er, hardly anyone strutting their stuff on the catwalk is really in visual kei getup. A couple people get close to nailing it, while everyone else seems to have gone for "random pretty outfit" instead. A thing, I will discover, that is very common when nobody gets what the theme is supposed to be.
Finally, the round is over and it's my turn to have a go, with the theme being "Future Career." I start as a shockingly slim, dark blue, faceless entity. A blank canvas, with which to do whatever I please. I'm used to being able to take my time with my virtual outfit planning, so having to rush around Dress to Impress' spacious dressing room in five minutes made me feel like I was doing a design challenge in RuPaul's Drag Race.
My first problem is that I have no idea how to change my skin colour, a thing I eventually end up Googling in old-aged desperation. Not in time for this runway, mind you, meaning I ended up sauntering down the runway in all my Avatar-toned glory. Thankfully, I easily find the hair and makeup stations to make me look slightly less sleep paralysis demon. The makeup presets are all bold and glamorous with smokey eyes and huge plump lips, reminiscent of my Bratz doll days. Very few of them have noses, and the ones that do are strangely upsetting. There's an option to be able to pick and choose individual elements to build my own Instagram model face, but they're locked behind a real-money purchase. Bummer.
As I mess around with the hair, I completely miss the fact that you can layer absolutely everything in this game. Nothing comes off unless you go out of your way to remove it, and I leave the salon chair looking like I haven't brushed my hair in six weeks while birds have started to build a nest in there. Not sure how I've managed to make my model look so tragic in a game where that state of being is nigh impossible, but here we are.
I go very basic and decide that my "future career" is some sort of generic office worker. I don't have time to figure out where everything is and what it does. I'm accidentally opening random menus and clicking on random objects like a grandma trying to navigate an iPhone that isn't magnified to shit.
In Vogue
The five minutes is up, and I hit the runway with the rest of my competitors. This is my time to shine—I've seen far too many TikToks talking about "pose 28" over the last few months, which sees my Dress to Impress model do a strange lean-back-splits while cupping her hands behind her back. I do that a few times, really selling the garments, before I slide off into the void to let the next ultra-glamorous model come out.
I end up most impressed by a player who has come out as a surgeon, dying a football pink to look like a brain. I wonder how she got covered in blood, and only realised after playing a few more rounds that she, uh, used the vitiligo skin option to make it happen. As my fellow Dress to Impress-er Kara Phillips said when I told her about it: "Everybody is so creative."
Blood surgeon ends up coming third, however, with another "generic office worker" fit taking first place while another player who I assume opted for the aforementioned "random pretty outfit" choice somehow nabs second.
That's something that, as I continued to play more games, I came to realise: The game is goddamn rigged, y'all. People show up with their friends, throw on a random fit and get first place for the pleasure. "Omggg tysm" was a regular response to it, with all the same sincerity of an actor who knew they were about to win an Oscar. Should I be mad about this at my big age? No, but was I mad about it? A little bit.
I power through the pure riggory happening though and play a few more games. Definitely for the purpose of this article and not because I was getting a teeny bit too into it. I discovered the existence of patterns and after the prior situation with my barnet, leaned into more intentional layering. A simple dress could be transformed by throwing on a tutu skirt or outer layer and making it the same colour or pattern, changing its shape entirely.
High fashion
I use all this arcane knowledge for the next theme Dress to Impress throws at me: Elegance. This should be an easy one to nail a win for. Instead of opting for the fishtail dresses everyone seemed to be immediately throwing on—partly because I didn't have it and was still blissfully unaware of the existence of Dress to Impress codes—I went for a more classical French elegance. Eating a croissant while drinking a cappuccino kinda vibes, y'know?
The runway happens, I strut my stuff and then the drumroll commences. The screen fades out to the podium, and there I am! Second place! I've finally secured the approval of my, presumably, significantly younger fashionistas-in-arms. I feel a weird sense of accomplishment about the whole thing, and a desire to dive back in and school these kids all over again. I go for one more round, and place dead last. Well, you can't win 'em all.
I did have a surprising amount of fun in Dress to Impress. It has its issues for sure: There's only one feminine body type, and of course it's painfully thin while somehow being curvy in all the "right" places. There's a masculine body type too, but the game only offers a puny corner of clothing choices for it. There's also an extortionate amount of clipping that happens with all the clothing and hair which can make combining some items frustrating, but hey, it's a free game in Roblox, not a thing I shelled out $70 for.
I have to admit I've been dipping back in for a couple of games here and there since wrapping up my initial curiosity session. I'm sure the limited selection of clothing and children calling me things like "fatso" and "uggo" will steer me away eventually. For now, it's a great throwback to my childhood, strange cyberbullying and all.
