A crucifix USB necklace carries a Barragán video game

The object first: a plastic crucifix that is also a USB drive, hung on a 22-inch curb chain, one size fits all, made in China, 270 dollars. Barragán's product copy is four words long where it matters—"THE END IS NEAR video game in file."

The game is real. THE END IS NEAR is a narrative game built for the label by Alex Sinh Nguyen, a designer who works under the banner "Dungeons&Design" and who also contributed to the project's initial prototype, per the announcement post from May. Development support came from Théo Dinh Nguyen, with the drive and packaging produced by two further collaborators. The label itself is the project Victor Barragán moved from Mexico City to New York to build—an experimental fashion house that has always treated the garment as one output among many.

The only route to THE END IS NEAR is to buy the necklace; the game is inseparable from the object that carries it, the way a cassette single was inseparable from the tape. And the object: street-preacher eschatology stamped into a crucifix and sold as an accessory. Fashion keeps circling videogames as material—we profiled Gareth Wrighton breaking fashion's virtual reality and traced how videogame fashion feeds real-world style—but Barragán has inverted the usual direction. The clothes are not referencing a game. The game is the merch, and the necklace is the console.