Dress Code

I’M DOING THE THING I ALWAYS HATED WHEN I WENT TO CLUBS AS A KID—INSTEAD OF DANCING, I’m just standing, staring at everyone here. Even worse, I’m checking out what they’re wearing, watching bodies move and swirl around me, trying to see if I can pick out cohesive styles, emerging trends. There are a lot of anime girls here. E-boys and e-girls in rave-friendly tech wear. There’s somebody in the corner dressed like a banana, another like Master Chief from Halo. Stylistically, it’s chaos, no obvious cohesion at all. It’s almost ugly, anxiety inducing. But it also feels warmly familiar to me, nostalgic, like I’ve slipped back in time twenty-five years to the parties of my youth.

Then the music changes, the DJ dropping a subwoofer-rattling slice of tech-step drum and bass, and the whole room flips. Walls visibly pulse to the bass line, and everyone in the club’s outfit changes, colors strobing with the music. For a nanosecond, the room is bright, and everyone looks like they’re encased in transparent plastic.

I laugh to myself, nodding with approval but feeling like I’ve outstayed my welcome, self-conscious that I look like that one old guy you see at every rave. Time to leave. But there’s no fighting through the dance floor to find the exit; just two button presses and I’m out, sitting back in my office at home, gazing at the colorful interface of VRChat—a platform that hosts a veritable smorgasbord of interconnected virtual worlds—before gently taking the hot plastic weight of a VR headset off my head.