Walk through the V&A’s Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, which runs in London until November 15, and it’s the surfaces you notice before the surrealism.
Elsa Schiaparelli sent her embroidery to Maison Lesage, the house Albert Lesage took over in 1924, commissioned Jean Dunand, better known for his Art Deco lacquer work, to paint trompe l’oeil pleats onto a 1931 dress, and in 1937 launched a perfume called Shocking alongside the color that became her signature, Shocking Pink. Almost a century later, the same instinct runs through the art direction of slot games, which isn’t where most fashion people go looking for it.
Surface, sheen and the trompe l’oeil habit
Slot art is trompe l’oeil from edge to edge. None of the velvet was ever woven, and the gemstones are a few hundred pixels of highlight and shadow. The “brushed metal” frame around most reels is a shader, a small piece of graphics code that fakes the streaks and highlights the way Dunand’s paint fakes a fold of silk.
The palette comes from fashion’s loudest moments. Schiaparelli proved a single saturated color could become an identity, and slot art runs on that idea. Jewel tones, hot pinks, emerald and gold are still the default, mostly because they stay readable on a phone at thumbnail size. Gold has its own logic on screen: it’s usually built from browns and yellows with a single bright highlight, because flat gold just reads as mustard. The frames around the reels borrow from jewelry too, with bezels, filigree and bevelled edges.
Color forecasting works on a longer clock than game art does. WGSN and Coloro announced Transformative Teal as their color for 2026 back in September 2024, more than a year ahead, because mills and dye houses need that kind of lead time. Game art is usually signed off months before release, so a studio that wanted to follow the runway would have to plan as far out as a textile mill, for a trend that might have moved on by launch. Fashion’s retail habits have rubbed off as well. Department stores have sold designer exclusives for decades, and major igaming operators have adopted the exact same strategy – commissioning custom-branded releases rather than buying off-the-shelf software. Looking across the Betway slot games catalogue online offers a clear example of this distribution model, where custom-branded titles developed solely for one platform function much like a high-street retailer’s dedicated capsule collection.
From sketchbook to character
Character art is where the runway shows most. The heroines and gods of mythology-themed games are styled more like an editorial shoot than a costume department. Even the jewelry follows the runway, with stacked gold cuffs and collar necklaces that could have come off a resort-collection mood board. A goddess on a reel is usually wearing eveningwear in all but name, a draped column dress and a headpiece big enough for the Met Gala, and character artists build her the way a costume designer would, silhouette first, then texture and ornament on top.
Fashion has been borrowed from games as well. In December 2020, Balenciaga presented its Fall 2021 collection as a video game, Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, a browser game in which visitors followed a set path through five zones, ending at a rave, while the characters around them wore the collection. Schiaparelli’s work with Dalí, which gave us the 1937 Lobster Dress, is still the first example anyone reaches for when collaborations between artists and fashion houses come up, nearly ninety years on.
The luxury lesson that hasn’t landed
What slot design has mostly ignored is restraint. The luxury houses of the past decade have leaned into what the trade press took to calling quiet luxury, with minimal logos, neutral palettes and a customer who’s expected to recognize the bag without being told whose it is. Bottega Veneta had that idea decades ago, when it built a house around woven leather and no visible logo at all. In December 2025 Pantone named Cloud Dancer, which it called a “lofty white,” its Color of the Year for 2026, the first white it has chosen since it began the program.
Slot art hasn’t followed. A white game would look unfinished next to its neighbors, and designers still work on the assumption that a casino screen should feel like an occasion. Of the two forecasts for 2026, WGSN and Coloro’s Transformative Teal, a deep blue-green, is far more likely to turn up behind a reel than Pantone’s white.
