Shanghai Fashion Month 2022

[Update] This game was banned on multiple Chinese social media within just 5 hours after its publishing. I received notifications from those social platforms. In this update, I replaced the textures of the dress for the last model character with the screenshots of those notifications. 

At the same time, I made another China Safe Version for the same game. Check it out here: https://purr-larifari.itch.io/sfm

Shanghai Fashion Month 2022 is a fashion event that definitely didn't take place in Shanghai, not from April to May, 2022. All the fashions in this piece are loosely based on the articles, videos and audio recordings that were circulating the social media during the lockdown. These "unreliable" sources often revealed extreme cases in which ordinary people were treated unfairly by another group of people — often those who enforcing orders from the authorities, sometimes foregoing the law. Although I believe these are only extreme individual occasions, yet the fact that such things still occur nevertheless saddens me. And I feel like they need to be remembered, or rather, I need to remember them. 

The other day, I was reading a short story of Tokarczuk's, in which there's a paragraph on T-shirts: 

"Maybe that's why he liked this idiosyncratic medium so much — T-shirts instead of newspapers and sparse TV news. World events were presented on the T-shirts, with all their problems, condensed to the maximum, provided with a pinch of the best spices — irony and sarcasm."

It feels just like that. For me, creating this short interactive experience feels just like making a T-shirt. 

In this experience, the player can control and switch between the 8 cameras focusing on this imaginary fashion show from various angles. 

I plan to update this piece irregularly, depending on the occurrences of new events, but I hope I don't need to. There is also possibilities that Shanghai Fashion Month could eventually become Shanghai Fashion Spring, but that's also against my wish. 

#SFM2022