Dress to Impress Brings New Users to Roblox

What does it take to become a Top Model? In the real world, joining the ranks of the modeling elite requires determination, discipline, a supportive agency and a whole lot of luck. But in the world of Dress to Impress, a wildly popular online game, it demands a very different set of skills.

Produced by a loose collective of young developers, known only by their usernames, and released in November of last year on the online gaming platform Roblox, Dress to Impress has quickly become one of the platform’s most popular experiences. The premise of the game is simple: At the beginning of each round, players are given a theme and have five minutes to create outfits that relate to that theme.

Outfits, in the context of the game, include hairstyle, makeup, clothes and accessories. When the five minutes is up, players showcase their creations on the catwalk, where others rank them from one to five stars. The more times you win a catwalk, the higher you climb in rank, until you officially garner the coveted title of Top Model.

Players can also choose freeplay mode, which allows them to experiment with the available clothing items without the pressure of time constraints or competition. Many use freeplay to recreate iconic celebrity outfits or practice for future rounds.

To date, the game has been played more than 2.7 billion times, according to a spokeswoman for Roblox, with the number of active users at any given moment fluctuating, but routinely numbering well over 250,000. The game’s success can be credited in part to its accessibility: Dress to Impress doesn’t require special equipment or consoles, is free to play and can be loaded on almost any computer or phone.

The game has become such a phenomenon that big names have gotten involved. James Charles, a YouTube creator with more than 23 million subscribers, dedicated multiple videos to Dress to Impress, and Charli XCX, the British singer and mother of “brat” summer, worked with the game developers in August to release brat-themed outfit patterns, which resulted in a record spike of 651,000 active users.

At the annual Roblox Innovation Awards this month, the game took home three honors: Best New Experience, Best Creative Direction, and Builderman Choice of Excellence.

Among the people who have achieved Top Model status in the game is Amira, who identified herself as a 22-year-old student from the East Coast. She uses the online moniker pinkcorduroy on TikTok, where she has more than half a million followers. She said in a phone interview that she spends at least a few hours every day playing the game.

“I had kind of fallen out of love with the games that I was playing on Roblox, and then one day I saw this Dress to Impress game,” she said. “And it doesn’t even look like Roblox, you know, it feels like you’re playing something else. That’s kind of how I fell into it. It was finals week — you know how that goes — I needed something to get away from stress. And then I kind of fell into the community.”

The fact that Dress to Impress doesn’t look like other Roblox experiences is part of its allure. In most Roblox games, your character is, well, just a block. But in Dress to Impress, users play as a highly customizable model, which appeals to the fashion-obsessed.

Amira cited the developers’ relationship with the players as another big reason the game grew so popular so quickly. “If there’s any issue at all with the game, they’re on it so quickly, faster than I’ve ever seen with any game,” she said. “I remember when the summer update came out a few months ago, a lot of the items were glossy, and the responses to it were kind of split. So they ran a poll, and they ended up going with what the majority wanted.”

Though Roblox has been around for more than a decade, it has mostly remained the domain of kids and teens, who became especially invested in it during the pandemic. But with Dress to Impress, those demographics are changing, and the company reported that around half of the game’s users are over 18.

“I think Dress to Impress is kind of this first big example of a game on Roblox actually garnering a wider appeal and a wider age spread,” said Ana Diaz, a culture writer for the gaming website Polygon, who is a dedicated Dress to Impress player. “Based on numbers, especially during the pandemic, the Roblox audience skews young. And what’s interesting about Dress to Impress is I’m seeing people in their late 20s and early 30s playing it and trying it out — people who have never played Roblox before.”

Amira said that at 22, she feels she is one of the older players, and that the game and its design feel “nostalgic” for her, like many of the “fashion girlie” games she played growing up.

“I think every generation needs its staple game,” she said, “and I think Dress to Impress is that for this generation.”