LAN stans: how fashion keeps coming back to the local area network

Martine Rose’s latest Nike collaboration 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 reimagined football kits to keep things cool in a room of overheated PCs. ​“We started looking at ​’90s LAN parties, where teenagers would take PCs to each other’s houses for all night gaming sessions and watch each other play,” Martine says of the latest Nike collaboration. ​“When we were [researching and] looking at images, it was very much tracksuits and comfortable silhouettes.” Martine has joined the LAN party, and she’s not the only one on the server.

Earlier this year, Coperni ditched the runway and hosted a swathe of gamers for a LAN party for their AW25 show instead, where the collection was unveiled and amplified by the screen glow of numerous monitors. Guests were seated between 200 gamers playing Fortnite, as Paloma Elsesser and Alex Consani weaved between them 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.

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 and ​’00s. Friends would lug chunky monitors over to each others homes, tangled in a web of Ethernet cables, and spend entire weekends connected through spaghetti wiring, sugar highs and mutual sleep deprivation. LAN parties are an aggressive contrast to the glamour of fashion: humming towers, cords snaking across the carpet, snack debris everywhere, niche jokes. But that’s also why they’re so alluring.

“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 about your age, background or gender, and there’s no requirement other than being good at your craft,” Martine says. ​“I find that really compelling, inclusive and inspiring. People find themselves there, they find their people.”

Did you try turning it on and off again?

By the mid-’00s, 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.

In an age of online fatigue and AI slop, people are nostalgic for physical proximity. Now, gamers who grew up on Discord are rediscovering the joy of actually sitting next to someone while playing videogames. On a bigger scale, conventions such as DreamHack – a renowned global gaming festival – continue to attract tens of thousands of gamers to join one big LAN party annually.

Embracing gaming culture meant that Martine searched for the very best gamers to star in the campaign for her Nike collab. ​“I’ve always been interested in finding the corners of mainstream cultures and shining a light on that. This was an opportunity to do that and I feel like I’ve learned a lot,” she says. Quite the subcultural scaler, Martine enlisted the likes of esports titan Ana Dumbravă and arcade legend Billy Mitchell (previous record holder of the highest ever Donkey Kong score). ​“We worked with [casting director] Isabel Bush again, and we wanted to get a range of different gamers from all backgrounds who played different styles of games. We ultimately wanted to represent as many different people as possible.”

Beyond the basement

The LAN party could be just one checkpoint in a much bigger game. Balenciaga have been the most visibly enthusiastic about it: remember when they turned a runway into a video game? Mind you, this was all under Demna’s stewardship. With Pierpaolo Picciolo now at the house’s helm, who’s to say what might happen next…

Fashion’s latest crush on LAN culture isn’t necessarily all about clothes – it’s about the company it creates, and embracing physical, funny and slightly forms of connection. And as any gamer will tell you, the match is much more dynamic when everyone’s in the same room.