Drest adds beauty mode with Gucci partnership

Luxury styling game Drest is continuing to expand its gaming world with a new beauty mode with an exclusive partnership with Gucci Beauty.

The luxury styling app fuses high fashion with editorial content, online shopping, gameplay and entertainment. It allows players to adopt the role of a fashion stylist and conduct daily styling challenges using the latest fashion and accessories from more than 160 of the world’s leading fashion brands including Gucci, Prada, Off-White, Loewe, Chloé, Thom Browne, Burberry and Stella McCartney.

The new Beauty Mode will allow players to showcase their make-up-artistry skills and explore their creativity with cosmetics on Drest’s model avatars. Using the new hyper-realistic close-up gameplay, players can add self-expression with cosmetics to their styling to a photoshoot or mood-board challenge.

Drest founder and chief executive, Lucy Yeomans, said in a statement: “Beauty has been on my agenda since I conceived the idea of Drest 10 years ago. As a magazine editor, I witnessed the power of beauty and its ability to influence fashion and vice versa. I love how beauty, like fashion, is a creative form of experimentation, discovery, and self-expression which is why it belongs on Drest.

“The challenge for us was getting Beauty Mode right and showcasing beauty in a way that excites and delights our players and our partnering brands.”

Drest to debut beauty mode in partnership with Gucci Beauty

Gucci Beauty will feature exclusively on Dress Beauty Mode until October 8 in conjunction with the launch of its Palette Beauté Des Yeux Floral, the first eye shadow palette from the fashion house. This will be alongside lipsticks, eyeliners, nail polish, and mascara.

Drest has created three different eye looks, which have been creatively directed by Gucci, and players will be able to choose how a particular make-up product is applied, through the use of Variant technology. The app will also feature two beauty shoot challenges and a mood board challenge that reflect Gucci Beauty’s unique vintage aesthetic.

Commenting on how Drest created its Beauty Mode, Yeomans said: “To make Beauty Mode as realistic as possible, we looked at over 4,000 images of close-up model poses and set up technical photoshoots with professional models to ensure every detail is as natural and lifelike as possible.

“We then applied each make-up item to our avatars individually to ensure we correctly matched skin tones and got the cosmetic placement right as every avatar has a different face shape, eye shape, lip size etc. For this, we deferred to the expertise of our consultant make-up artist, Mary Greenwell, involving months of discussion and iterations.”

Beauty Mode challenges will be free to play and shoppable via direct links to the partners’ e-commerce platforms, explains Drest, and players who engage with the new gameplay will be gifted a digital beauty product that can be used in later challenges.

Following the Gucci Beauty partnership, Drest’s unbranded Beauty Mode challenges will go live on the app in January 2022.

Drest’s managing director, Tess Macleod Smith added: “We are thrilled to be collaborating with Gucci for the ground-breaking launch of beauty mode on Drest. Gucci were our visionary partners in 2019 who recognised Drest as a highly creative, new global marketing platform to connect with new audiences via experiential gameplay and we have continued to innovate with them over the past 24 months.

“Beauty mode is one of our most ambitious projects to date and our best interactive real-time story-telling in a new category which we know is hotly anticipated by our global audience.”

The launch of Beauty Mode follows the addition of a new jewellery and watch mode in September, which debut with an exclusive partnership with Cartier to highlight its Clash [Un]limited collection. The new mode allowed players to experiment with stacking jewellery, layering bracelets, necklaces or rings to a photoshoot.