With advances in technology, creating your dream wardrobe without regard to costs can become a reality with the help of Covet Fashion, a virtual styling game app available on your smartphone or tablet.
Covet Fashion was created by fashion industry mogul Rachel Zoe in aims to provide the publics with, “a personalized styling experience that allows you to pick pieces from the best virtual closet,” said Zoe, “I think it has the potential to change way people discover and interact with fashion.”
The app allows users to dress up virtual avatars in current-season outfits from top designers such as Cynthia Rowley, Rebecca Minkoff, and Mara Hoffman. What sets the game apart from other’s in its genre is that if the player like his/her virtual look, they can buy it in real life through links that connect with each digitized fashion item.
{ Can’t picture it? Check out the app trailer for yourself! }
Players are given control of the process every step of the way beginning with choosing your own model’s features. Option to change the model’s hair, make
up, skin color, and outfit makes the game completely customizable to each player and their interpretations of what is in current trend. However the interesting feature of model selection, is that each avatar is one size, societies “ideal weight”.
As a major part of the game, players gain tickets by voting on other stylist’s looks and use those tickets to enter more “events” which give players a theme to dress their avatar for such as An Epic Road Trip, Hampton’s White Party, or Beachside Stroll. Setting themed events in which players submit their looks sets guidelines for stylists to follow, and allows them to gain virtual money, prizes, tickets, and likes by entering these “contests”.
Covet Fashion lets users compete in daily styling challenges, where winners are chosen via a user-based voting system. Esteemed designers such as Zoe herself even selects winners on selected challenges.
The more contests you win and likes you receive from other player, the more money you will have to contribute to your wardrobe.
The game is a cross between online shopping, virtual styling, and competition based on materialistic items and social liking based on acceptance by others. Covet crosses the line between fantasy materialism and real life, by connecting normal people trying to get into fashion or even those who have no interest in the fashion world at all with professionals and amateurs in the fashion industry and providing digitized images of real life fashions.
‘You can learn about fashion, interact with fashion and use it as a stepping stone to purchase fashion,’ said Jeffrey Tseng, CEO of Crowdstar, a coding system paired with the app to recognize trends in style choices among players. “We’re bridging different worlds here. You’re styling, you’re sharing and you’re shopping.”
Covet is a platform that allows players to tap into their materialist fantasy, by granting them access to build their dream closet filled with top brands which cost top dollars. The accessibility and the fantasy nature of the game appeals to a wide audience that just simply have access to download the app. 
The game directly reflects today’s cultural reality that places great deal of importance on appearance and materialistic lifestyles. Through the process of allowing players to customize their ideal self through the creation of their model, merging virtual desires to fit in with current trends and allowing them to become reality with access to purchasing items, and earning money that can only be used to enhance your avatar’s appearance through peer acceptance and liking – the game urges players to accept the current social culture focused on appearance.
With a deeper look, Covet reflection of the current social culture makes you question, “Is it a harmless fashion game, or a mirror reflecting societal views and pressures right back at us?”
Taking on Trends 