Roblox’s History of Fashion Games
Roblox, a multiplayer gaming platform, has been around since the early 2000s. Founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, Roblox has already seen many different games rise and fall out of popularity. These include games like Meep City, Bee Swarm Simulator, Adopt Me, Pet Simulator X, Piggy, and Jailbreak. This site is constantly added to. Consequently, few games have been able to hold onto their popularity. Despite the huge popularity of Dress to Impress at the moment, it isn’t the first of its kind on the platform.
Dressing up has always been a big part of Roblox, even outside of specific games. A huge part of Roblox’s appeal is avatar customization; people often spend hundreds of dollars creating elaborate outfits on the game. When we talk about fashion within specific games though, there are quite a few that come to mind. Some of the most popular ones before the emergence of Dress to Impress are Royale High and Fashion Famous, both of which garnered billions of visits over their time on the site.
The game most often compared to Dress to Impress is Fashion Famous. These games have very similar styles. Both have a theme at the beginning of each round with players rushing to try and create an outfit that goes along with it. Like Dress to Impress, Fashion Famous allows for extensive character customization with tons of clothes, faces, and hair. Unlike Dress to Impress, however, rather than sitting down to customize your face and hair, you had to walk through rows of them to find the one you wanted. The characters were much closer to the blocky style you would see on the rest of Roblox, and although there were rows and rows of outfits, they were a lot less customizable. The players couldn’t change the patterns or colors on anything. After the players put together their outfits according to the theme, they would all walk the catwalk one at a time, while the other players would vote for them. Fashion Famous was extremely popular throughout the 2010s and even until the early 2020s. However, it lost popularity over the years, especially after the rise of Dress to Impress.
Lots of Dress to Impress’s current fan base actually comes from Fashion Famous. Wuruchi Ali ’26 is one of those players. “I guess the reason I play Dress To Impress is because since I was a kid, I’ve always had a love for fashion shows and dressing up. I played a plethora of dressing up games on those free game websites for kids, and I suppose that love traveled to roblox. I’ve played a lot of fashion games such as Fashion Famous and Royale High: Sunset Island. However, I think ultimately Dress to Impress comes out on top due to its diversity in themes – diverse enough to keep my creative juices flowing – and its overall addictiveness. I was at first against the idea of playing the game, but eventually I relented, played with a friend, and got hooked immediately,” said Ali.
Royale High is a very well-known fantasy roleplaying game. Like the name suggests, player would roleplay as royalty or fantasy creatures in a high school. The game was very basic and easy to play in its early stages. The goal was to attend class, perform well, and complete homework, the classes being the standard English, math, science, and art classes. In the classes, players simply play minigames and are graded on how well they performed. It was similar to many other high school role-playing games at the time, like Robloxian High School.
As the game grew, fashion became a huge part of the Royale High community. The developers began adding more and more fashion items, collections of various skirts, dresses, tops, and heels. These were all sold for thousands of “diamonds” that players would consistently grind the game for. Royale High rapidly gained popularity, becoming one of the most frequented games on the site and boasting around 9.9 billion visits.
However, Royale High quickly lost popularity as it was more focused on the aesthetics of the game rather than the actual gameplay. The game lost its core roleplaying elements as the new school map was released. It no longer included cafeterias or classrooms, making it harder for players to bond and form friendships. Royale High also focused a lot on players spending diamonds – a form of currency in Royale High – for every little thing, especially for clothes. It also became increasingly difficult to get these diamonds as a new player and even the older players were made to spend hours in the game to gain diamonds. The game quickly lost its appeal in 2024 and the amount of players on the game dropped rapidly from once ~200k a day to barely hitting 20k.
What is Dress To Impress?
Amidst these once popular fashion games declining in popularity, Dress to Impress stepped in. Although the game had only been released in November 2023, it quickly skyrocketed in fame and popularity. Like most other fashion games that came before its time, it’s a competitive dress up game. The players have 5 minutes and 25 seconds to complete their outfits before competing against each other to see whose outfit best fits the prompt. This time restraint forces players to be more strategic about how they spend their time, further helping highlight the most creative and efficient ones. At the end of their time, players can no longer change their outfits and have to go onto the runway where other players give them stars based on how good their outfits were. Dylan Wu ’26 said, “Dress to Impress makes me use my imagination to its fullest, the way I need to choose a perfect outfit to impress others in a short span of time fuels my spirit and makes the game fun.” The game is straightforward but also has certain complex parts, involving a lot of customization by giving players the option to layer different clothes, accessories, and hairs together. Players can choose between a variety of patterns and colors to edit each piece of clothing, giving them a lot of creative freedom.
Dress to Impress Lore
Behind the sparkles and glamor of Dress to Impress, a hidden story lies at the core of the game. Although the developers had only meant to make it an April fools update, the diary that they added quickly turned into an extensive plot with various separate games all adding onto the story.
The lore first starts with the diary of an NPC (Non-Player Character) named Lana. In the game, her only job was to paint players’ nails. In this diary, Lana complains about working in Dress to Impress, about how no one knew her name, and how she was planning to run away. It doesn’t seem too suspicious at first, but in the next page, Lana writes that she’s going to set fire to the nail studio and has a list of targets. This still seems pretty straightforward; it appears as though Lana was tired of working as the nail lady and decided to rebel.
However, after another update we learned that Lana disappeared. She was replaced by a doppelganger who takes on the role of the nail lady. Lana’s diary has also been moved to the top of a cabinet and held theories that the new nail lady was why players were going missing, on the wall behind the nail lady there are three missing posters. On the next page there is a User ID which leads to Lana’s roblox profile.
This was the catalyst for everything else that happens in the rest of the lore. Throughout everything Lana appears as a questionable and untrustworthy figure. The players can’t always tell who the real Lana is or if she’s telling the truth. Later on, it’s revealed that Lana was only playing victim and was the ultimate antagonist. Although many have tried to take her down, they have all failed and ended up helping her reach her end goals. In the end, it’s a story about a girl who was going through hard times and was taken under a cult. Lana has been manipulated and manipulated others but ultimately shows no signs of remorse for any of her actions.
This level of intricate storytelling was something that no one could expect out of a game like Dress to Impress and is why it’s so interesting. The story is obviously well thought out, with tons of twists and turns. No one can really tell what to expect, especially with the lore still constantly being updated.
What makes Dress to Impress special and why is it so popular now?
I’ve never been a particular fan of fashion games. Like many of Roblox’s audience, I preferred more action based games. Most of my time spent on the app was in games like Arsenal, Murder Mystery 2, and other various games on it. However, Dress to Impress somehow caught my attention. The game was very straight to the point, dress up and look better than the others. Although it wasn’t the hands on, constant action kind of game I’m used to, it was still pretty competitive. All the avatar and clothing models were well made and there was a lot of creative freedom with all the patterns you could use to decorate the clothing.
Dress to Impress is quick to follow trends, blowing up quickly over “Brat Summer” – a lifestyle trend this summer embodying youth culture, playful fashion and self-expression – with their own collection of clothing to go along with this iconic pop culture moment. Players of all ages had hopped onto this hype train of Dress to Impress over the summer. The game was quickly popularized with tons of famous streamers and YouTubers playing it.
Dress to Impress seems to break all the standards of Roblox games and created a playerbase of people who typically wouldn’t play Roblox. Dress to Impress also reaches out to people’s sense of creativity. Matteo Dona ’25, LaGuardia High School student, said, “I love Dress to Impress because it fuels my creativity through fashion and competition, and other people’s looks are all so uniquely different, and I get a lot of inspiration from them.” Although Dress to Impress’s environment is very competitive, its players still manage to have fun, which continues to fuel the game’s popularity.
Dress to Impress seems to break all the standards of Roblox games and created a playerbase of people who typically wouldn’t play Roblox.