“The unseen blade is the deadliest”: exploring the intersection of fashion, gender, and identity in digital worlds. The case study of League of Legends.

This chapter analyses the interaction between fashion and digital technologies, focusing on virtual environments such as video games. Traditionally, fashion has played a strong role in defining social classes, genders, body ideals and identities With the advent of the digital, these dynamics have changed,amplified and extended beyond the physical world. Using netnography and visual ethnography, this chapter aims to examine how one of the most popular multiplayer video game, League of Legends (LoL), represent bodies and genders, to explore whether traditional mainstream fashion models are reflected or, conversely, transformed. By examining official content produced by a popular gaming platform, the research seeks to trace how representations of body and gender are conveyed in a topdown manner, similar to traditional fashion communication. This investigation highlights the hybrid relationship between fashion, gaming and media, in which the boundaries between material and non-material, online and offline, constantly shift. In conclusion, it would seem that certain stereotypes, mainly linked to canonical Western ideas of beauty, are also reconfirmed in these digital contexts, which are theoretically free from the usual dynamics of traditional materiality.