Well, we weren’t expecting that. Louis Vuitton creative supremo Nicolas Ghesquière may have said back in October that his SS16 collection was all about a dark virtual reality. But we didn’t take him seriously.

Now he’s taken virtual reality a step further by revealing the ad campaign for that collection. And the star of the campaign? A video game ‘virtual’ face. Yep, step forward Final Fantasy XIII’s Lightning, the kick-ass heroine of the game series owned by Square Enix and created by video game design star Tetsuya Nomura.

Ghesquière has been releasing teaser photos and video on his Instagram account and the weirdest thing about them is how very normal they look. It just shows how far we’ve come in accepting the blurring of tech and reality.

He’s not the first to use Final Fantasy characters to promote fashion – Prada did that in Japan three years ago when it used male characters in a show for its men’s line.

But it’s certainly the most interesting ad campaign so far for SS16. And it really highlights the need to create ever-higher-profile news around seasonal ad campaigns. It’s a competitive (fashion) world out there…