A cropped pink shirt, slouchy cargo pants, and a couple of tiny layered necklaces. Straggling friendship bracelets, white Sambas, and hair perfectly unkempt. A barely messy bedroom in the background. The TikTok “look” is instantly clockable — and it’s always changing. If you’re paying attention, you can spot the first glimmers of a new trend about to take off. It almost always starts when a TikToker reveals an outfit with each key item linked out to its source. A few days (or even hours) later, and anyone who’s anyone has theirs: the key items that make up the look. That is, until the next trend comes along. A few hours ago, it was red cowboy boots. Right now, it’s ribbons on Sambas. By the time this story is published, who knows what it will be.
It happened almost the exact same way on Club Penguin, the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) created by New Horizon Interactive in 2005 (and later acquired by Disney in 2007). If you were a cool penguin — that is, if your penguin avatar was clockably cool to other players — it meant you were on-trend. It didn’t make any difference whether you wore a clown hat with a tuxedo or a viking helmet with blue sneakers to hang out at the Pizza Parlor. What mattered was how you layered everything, which coveted vintage items you could whip out, and how closely you followed each new trend set by the influencers of the penguin-verse. Google “club penguin cool outfit” and you’ll see what the cool penguins were rocking back in 2006: a black hoodie, pearl or golden star necklaces, black shades, and blue sneakers. (It took some time for pants to make their way into the game.)
On the surface, to have clout in Club Penguin was all about having personality. But, like with TikTok, it really meant understanding how to act on the platform — you had to spend a lot of time there, and you had to pay attention to how everyone else was using it, too. Since the beginning of Internet culture, there have always been ways to influence fashion. Club Penguin just might have been one of the first.
It was a run-of-the-mill TikTok video set to music from the Club Penguin Pizza Parlor that first made me see the similarities and sent me on my journey of reminiscence. I started playing Club Penguin in 2006, about seven years before the game reached its peak of 200 million players. I signed up by entering my email, chose a penguin avatar by color, and was set loose to wander the penguin-verse, a fictional Arctic tundra, by way of a map. There was the Ski Village, the Plaza, the Ice Rink, and, of course, the iconic (though unmarked) Iceberg to explore. Along with countless other penguin avatars, I had my choice of activities: play mini-games to earn coins, work in the coffee shop or Pizza Parlor, have a night out at the Dance Club, or spend the afternoon overhauling my igloo. Most importantly, though, I could dress up.
If you wanted to stay on-trend, you had to waddle down to the bottom right corner of the town square (aptly named the “Town” on the map) where all the cool penguins gathered to socialize and show off their latest outfits. Every month, you knew to visit the Gift Shop, which was home to the holy grail: the “Penguin Style” catalog. The rush to get it could only be compared to a Supreme drop; the catalog itself was a work of art.
I opened my first issue of “Penguin Style” sometime around November 2006. Back then, the options played almost directly into the penguin trope: wooden snowshoes, ski goggles, hockey jerseys, earmuffs, scarves, old-fashioned diver’s helmets, and snorkel masks. As each month came and went, I watched the publication step up its game, from its inventory to overall art direction. By the end of its run, the catalog offered everything from purple sherpa jackets with matching Crocs to fake eyelashes and intricate wigs, which were introduced in 2007. “I don’t know if I was pro-wig,” says Erin Clewell, a dedicated user of CP for many years. “I really wanted my penguin to be penguin-esque. I didn’t want her to look like a literal human.”
The behind-the-scenes creation of the “Penguin Style” catalog was much like that of a real publication, with the CP team working three months out to get each new issue published. “We would get a week of solid concept time, and then we would pitch it to our stakeholders,” says one former Club Penguin illustrator, whom I’ll refer to as Smith. “We would have a couple days for fixes, and then it was off to the races. Everybody went into their own teams and just built, built, built. We would build it out over the next two or three weeks, and then it would get implemented. Once it was all ready, we would wrap it up in this nice, little bow and ship it out.”
Their hard work paid off: Players adored every element and helped construct what would become a robust style culture within the game.
Dressing a penguin avatar was personal, and having style in the penguin-verse was subjective. However, that didn’t mean there weren’t dominant trends. With each catalog drop came the inevitable shift in the “approved” penguin look. Because just like on TikTok, there were tastemakers in CP. What they wore, and how they wore it, instantly rippled through the entire penguin community. If you knew, you knew, and it was apparent who did and who didn’t.
There were also the holier of holy grails: items hidden within the “Penguin Style” catalog itself. Only by hovering your cursor over a certain word or image in the catalog could these nested items be unlocked. “Because it was hidden and you had to click on the right little part of the picture to find it, that stuff was always more appealing,” says John Stoumbos, another former CP user. The gold viking helmet was one of the toughest to find — not to mention the cost, which was a whopping 1,500 coins. Once you’d found one of these rare, hidden items, you began to recognize other users who had, too. “That meant that they were cool enough and in-the-know enough to look.”
Players collected clothing items like art. After a few years of navigating the game, it was possible to build quite the fashion archive. These users experienced the added thrill of knowing they had exclusive items that would never return to the sales racks of the “Penguin Style” catalog (the equivalent of vintage in Club Penguin). Nothing was a higher compliment than a fellow penguin asking, “Where’d you get that shirt?” and being able to reply with, “It’s from a year ago.”
Sure, there was no underground economy for penguins to re-sell their clothing to other users (there should’ve been), but what you got was clout — and to have clout on CP was valuable.
It wasn’t just what you had, but how you wore it. Clout was awarded to louder, more layered outfits; the unwritten CP motto was “the more, the better” (the skeleton for gorpcore, perhaps). This environment turned seemingly arbitrary things into fashion. It was totally normal to show up to a fancy soirée in a burnt-red ski vest with blue checkered shoes or a life jacket paired with a propeller hat. Walking past a penguin in a dragon costume with a clown wig was just as normal as walking past a penguin in a classic tuxedo.
“As soon as a penguin walked into a room, you could tell exactly how experienced they were and how good at the game they were because of how much they had on,” says Clewell. “It wasn’t about a cohesive outfit — it was about how much you could layer on yourself to look like everything had just burst onto you.”
Let’s not forget that CP came along in the mid-2000s during peak Y2K maximalism: big pants, spaghetti straps, chokers, sporty sunglasses, pink feather boas, and all things glitter. Those who could pull it off were usually as eccentric as their outfits. “I feel like the really cool people were doing the maximalist, eclectic, one-of-everything, all-different-stuff look,” Kevin Stinchcomb, another former CP user, says. “The people who had on the bunny slippers with a hula skirt and the 3-D glasses and a viking helmet — just stuff that didn’t make sense — it somehow all worked.”
“The thing that really propelled Club Penguin forward was the creativity and the passion of the fans,” says Smith. “I know that sounds super corny, but it’s really true. We were on there every week, just being like, ‘Oh my god, did you see their igloo?’ It would inspire us and inform the decisions we would [make] in Club Penguin.”
And then it all came to an abrupt end. By 2008, my interest in the game reached its own natural conclusion, and by March 29, 2017, the game was gone entirely. In one last gasp, it rebranded as Club Penguin Island, though the new version was discontinued by the end of 2018. When Club Penguin shut down for good, the fashion collections that members had spent years curating were effectively wiped off the planet.
“Our players made the lore,” says the former Club Penguin illustrator. “We made a goofy little game with penguins: You guys made it deep. You guys put the story in it. You guys put the lore in it; you made it so much more impactful than we ever could’ve tried.”
In many ways, Club Penguin was a real community under the guise of being a game, or at least that’s what it felt like. CP was a form of social media that didn’t even realize it was one. Platforms at the time such as MySpace, Tumblr, and LiveJournal all aimed to connect people through shared interests and obsessions. But having a penguin avatar gave us a certain independence that a tiny profile picture in the corner of a screen couldn’t. While The Sims offered some major customization in that department, there was something about the novelty of a cartoon penguin that just felt more accessible and, ironically, more human.
I miss it sometimes. Every now and then, I’ll think about that online wardrobe of mine. I’d trade a knee just to spend five minutes scrolling through my old Club Penguin fashion archive one last time. (Somewhere, someplace, all our old golden viking helmets and blue water wings are floating around like Sandra Bullock in Gravity.) Though Club Penguin was technically a game, it forever ingrained in me the different ways of throwing an outfit together. Like TikTok for so many teens today, it was how I first encountered the notion of personal style. One day, I can imagine them thinking back on videos of cultural pioneers breaking down outfits and turning utilitarian basics into canvases for self-expression with a similarly wistful gratitude. So the next time I walk out the door, I just might throw on a viking helmet for good measure.
