Louis Vuitton Looks to Video Games for Its New Model

Star of Final Fantasy XIII exchanges sword for handbag
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 29, 2015 12:50 PM CST
Louis Vuitton Looks to Video Games for Its New Model
Louis Vuitton's newest model is a popular video-game character named Lightning.   (Instagram)

With real people apparently increasingly unable to afford its luxury handbags, Louis Vuitton is opening up a whole new market: fake people. CNN reports the "face" of the company's next ad campaign is Lightning, a collection of pixels and also a major character in the Final Fantasy video game series. Louis Vuitton's creative director, Nicolas Ghesquiere, posted a video of Lightning aggressively modeling the company's newest products to Instagram this week. According to the Verge, Lightning is the hero of Final Fantasy XIII and has appeared in multiple installations of the series, which Fortune calls "one of the most iconic franchises in gaming history."

Ghesquiere describes the Lightning-starring campaign, Series 4, as one in which "reality and fantasy become one," Fortune reports. Ghesquiere worked with Final Fantasy developer Square Enix and character designer Tetsuya Nomura to create the campaign, according to CNN. Quartz reports it's unclear how widely Lightning will be used in the Series 4 campaign or if she will be joined by other pixellated characters. Perhaps surprisingly, this isn't Lightning's first foray into modeling. According to CNN, she and other Final Fantasy characters appeared in a Japanese magazine's 2012 Prada fashion spread. (Another realm where fashion is meeting the future: fitting rooms.)

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