Why now is the perfect time to combine fashion and gaming, according to ARK/8

ARK/8 has been active since 2019, when the founder and creative director, Dimitri van Eetvelde, decided it was time to bring his passion for gaming to life through high-end, elevated fashion. Since then, ARK/8 has released collections inspired by games including Overwatch 2 and Dead Island 2, as well as the supremely popular The Lands Between collection based on Elden Ring.

We know what you’re thinking; ‘I can nip into pretty much any major retailer now and find a bit of gaming merch with Sonic or Pikachu slapped across the chest’. But that isn’t what ARK/8 is doing; ARK/8 wants to put fashion and fandom on equal footing, and has only grown in size since its inception, with popular streamers like Kai Cenat sporting some of the brand's garms.

Shortlist recently popped down to the new ARK/8 store in Hackney to celebrate the opening of the fashion company’s first-ever physical shop alongside the drop of its latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 clothing line -- allowing us to see what the company is all about, chat with the founder and nab a can of Soopa Hooch out the fridge.

We saw the quality and passion that’s been threaded into each piece, as well as ARK/8's own non-gaming lines, which will also stand out in any crowd. Shortlist sat down with Dimitri to discuss the company's mission and ambition and why now is the perfect time for gaming to be taken seriously when combined with fashion.

Why the focus on gaming? Specifically why, personally, for you, was there a need to explore this space?

Dimitri van Eetvelde: It was always my main passion since I started playing games when I was basically six or seven years old. It became a bit of a fascination for me. And it was always there, I guess, together with music, which was my other sort of main point of interest. But I always felt like, when I was a teenager, growing up in the 80s and 90s, gaming was very different.

It was really seen as something you didn't want to admit to publicly, that you were playing games, because it was seen as something very nerdy or weird for lonely kids. But I think that has changed a lot, and I've never stopped playing games since then, and I've just loved seeing the evolution of the industry.

I think it's a fascinating industry because it keeps evolving all the time, and the way the stories are told just becomes richer and richer with time. And, you know, I actually didn't plan to work in games or be related to games professionally, but just after I finished university, I had a business degree in hand, and I was thinking, I want to start my own business. So I started developing Level Up Wear, which started in 2007 and was my first brand.

The idea was to create quality gaming merch. You know, we started pretty simply with a bunch of talented freelance designers who helped us create a bit of a graphic identity, and we focused on creating original illustrations and reinterpretations of games. So we started pitching gaming companies and, you know, trying to get licensing deals to do official stuff, and that ultimately led to us getting a contract with Capcom. We were very lucky to get that early on in our process, and then we actually started distributing some of our products to Game in the UK. They were one of our first wholesale customers.

My idea was always to create any sort of physical manifestation of gaming and represent the gaming digital worlds into real-life experiences. So, that always became a bit of a mission for me.

Do you think that sets you up for ARK/8 now?

DvE: Yeah, clearly, as much as I started with just the idea that I wanted to do something that had to do with gaming, I just jumped into it, you know, seeing that that opportunity was there. But the way ARK/8 came about was when I, you know, after doing about 15 years of Level Up Wear and selling mostly to wholesale clients, I wanted to do something more direct [to consumer].

I wanted to connect with the people who enjoyed the same games that I did, and I guess that became my second mission was to create a place that was supposed to become a bit of the replacement of what video game stores used to be, where people could just come in and hang out and share a common passion.

So, backtracking a little bit to talk about the ARK/8 brand. I guess that some of the frustration of creating gaming merch as I grew older as well, and I was more into, you know, more durable fashion, more sustainable fashion, and creating a brand, as opposed to, quote-unquote, 'just creating merch'.

I had the idea for ARK/8 in about 2015/2016, and I started putting together a rough sketch of what that would be like. From there, I learned a lot more about fashion.

It took me a few years to learn and start establishing what the creative direction for our kid would be and what the quality would look like. But then, you know, utilising the network and the relationships that have been built through Level Up with the gaming companies because that's been my job for over 15 years. So that helped kick start the project.

When you transitioned from Level Up to ARK/8, opting to blend high fashion with games, did the developers understand what you wanted to do?

DvE: I think a lot of them were, and I want to say all of them were, excited at the prospect because they were really happy that someone would, I guess, take a chance and take risks and say, ‘Hey, we want to create very bold collections that are, you know, quality-wise, very elevated’. That also goes further in terms of designs and becomes a little bit more abstract and conceptual. Everybody was in favour of that.

So, the idea was immediately very positively received, and it was pretty easy for us to do that transition. But after that obviously comes the challenge of creating things that are slightly less literal. And so there was a bit of a learning curve there with the partners for them to understand our vision -- also for us to, I want to say, make that vision a little bit more focused and materialise that a little bit better. So, there was a bit of a learning curve.

For about two years, we exchanged a lot with our different partners and worked together on establishing something that was a bridge between them and us. Because that's always the difficulty, even though they love the concept, they don't necessarily have fashion designers over there, so the fact that you have to make certain choices that are not entirely what they would imagine for the brand is, I guess, the biggest challenge.

But so far, so good, because as we progress, we have accumulated a lot of experience in bridging the gap so not creating things that are so experimental that they wouldn't get it at all, and for them to as well understand, you know, our language and what we're trying to do.

You seem to be proving it as well, don’t you? When the first collections drop and everyone enjoys them, that is proof of concept.

DvE: Sure, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we were grateful to see so much support for our first collections. We had a lot of influential people, where the collections, the Elden Ring collection, got a lot of visibility, and a lot of circles that hadn't been touched before by, you know, fashion based on gaming. That obviously got back to our partners. They were like, ‘wow, this is really interesting’, because this is a bit of a new audience for us, or at least it's like a new type of visibility that we're getting through this kind of fashion. So that really helps.

You just mentioned doing this because you love gaming and grew up playing games. Is there an ambition to do retro collections as well?

DvE: Of course. And I think you know, today is an important milestone for us, because we're opening our first store in London, and the goal of the store is to not just sell ARK/8 clothing but to sell anything that we love that we feel isn’t being either sold or not curated in the way that we want it to be. So we're going to start selling retro games in the store.

Definitely, the next step would be for us to work on more retro properties. There's something about us: we are much more about games that have resonated culturally. It doesn't matter when they came out. We're not really after the next big thing. We're more about things that have already proven their worth. And you know, this is why retro will be a point of focus for us moving forward, for sure.

I think the history of gaming is fascinating. It's now, you know, more than 40 years of gaming, if you think about it, which is kind of crazy when you say it like that, but I think there's so much there that is interesting. Going back in time is fascinating because even when you look at the fashion in those games back then, it was very different from what we do nowadays. But it's also very inspiring because, funnily enough, I can see some really interesting connections between fashion and some retro games and what's trending in real-life fashion nowadays.

Is that to do with 'risky' fashion becoming much more open and accepted across the board? Now you can try anything out and it has a place.

DvE: That's true. It offers you more space, you can try to do interesting things. I think there's a lot of experiments in fashion nowadays that allow that self-expression to shine through. A lot of small brands are doing fascinating things, and I think a lot of people are now also more daring because it's easier to discover those brands nowadays.

I think people can lean harder into their own style. I also think it's a great thing to see. But I'm also seeing a lot of brands where I'm like, ‘huh, it seems like, they were inspired by this particular game or that particular game, without really naming it necessarily’. Or maybe it's not even a conscious thing that happened, but maybe the designer was subconsciously influenced by the fashion in games.

What are your goals, and where do you want to push the company?

DvE: We want to continue providing physical and digital experiences to our audience that feels exciting. Our mission is pretty much to celebrate games and make sure that we can unpack and show things that are, again, probably not always visible to most people. We want to create physical items always, because that's important to me.

I'm a big collector of games. I still love buying LPs and having a physical piece that I can [enjoy], you know, all digital is not working for me. I like a balance between both. So that's a big part of our mission, to have that sort of physical translation of the digital worlds. And so people can have objects and fashion, home goods, things that they can be excited about and bring home.

I feel like gaming culture is the new skate culture, in a way. We really feel like this is the decade where gaming and pop culture are ready to invade the runways of the big time.

We can't have this conversation without talking about the Call of Duty collection, which is launching today; how big of a moment was it to get something of that scale and the lineage it's got?

DvE: What's really interesting is to see that we're coming back to it with a completely different formula because we used to do merch. Now, it's mixing fashion with something as big as Call of Duty.

It's a big honour to work with such an enduring franchise. I also think it goes hand in hand with our mission because we don't want to be seen as an elitist brand. We want to push that accessibility.

Because, again, if our mission is to show gaming to as many people as possible and what's good in gaming to as many people as possible, I think Call of Duty helps do that because everyone knows Call of Duty itself, one of the, you know, maybe five video games that anybody knows, like everybody knows, even if they don't play it.

Call of Duty is such a monument that we're just very excited to be able to do something with them. It's crazy to see. I don't think anybody would have imagined that it would still be here when the first few Call of Duty games came out and were successful. I think there's that thing of every year where we’re like, ‘Yeah, is Call of Duty still a thing?’ and every year, it's just getting bigger and bigger, which is crazy. So yeah.

I know you probably can’t give too much away about what’s next in terms of collections, but are there any teases on what to expect from ARK/8 lines in the future?

DvE: One thing that we can say is that we will do our first-ever collaboration this time with an anime. So the next one will not be a game, but it will be, I want to say, a cult classic in Japanese animation.

We've got a lot of exciting collaborations coming up, but I think one of the things that we're excited about is that we are planning on opening a store in the US in Los Angeles. So I think the big thing happening for us in 2025 and 2026 is making sure that those physical locations become cultural hubs, you know, for our audience and community.

Images provided by ARK/8