Ever since The Sims was unleashed upon the world back in 2000, modders have existed and thrived online. They create custom objects like clothes and furniture, alter the way Sims look, and add complexity to gameplay. Generally, if you want to spice up your Sims games, your first go-to will be custom content made by these modders – most of it’s free, you get to use items not available in the base experience, and because they’re made by players, they reflect what we actually want at a given point in time.
The Sims has had expansion packs ever since the first game, which introduced seven packs that each allowed players to explore different mechanics – you could throw parties, explore new neighbourhoods, go on vacations, and more. There weren’t dedicated stuff packs until The Sims 2, but every addition to the series since has had both expansion and stuff packs. Unfortunately, these are notoriously expensive and don’t always reflect what players want to see, which is why players end up making their own content instead.
The thing about clothes in The Sims is that, while we’re sometimes given free updates to the base game with new pieces, it’s completely unrealistic for us to expect its clothes to be trendy. Ultra-fast fashion has proliferated with the appearance of websites like Shein, and so the life cycle of trends has shrunk to almost nothing. I’ve never been a particularly trendy person, almost all my clothes come from a single store, and I don’t particularly enjoy shopping, but even I’ve noticed this. Clothes are out of trend within the season you bought them in, sometimes even within weeks.
Much like how it’s financially and environmentally unsustainable for people to be paying attention to micro-trends, The Sims has never been known to bow to the fashion gods and create particularly fashion-forward clothes for the base game – if they do, they’re packaged and sold in fashion packs, like Moonlight Chic and Incheon Arrivals. But unlike the real-life fashion cycle, there is no machinery poised to create new items the moment a Kardashian is seen wearing something previously unpopular before, because it would be too expensive for EA to be beholden to something as ephemeral as a micro-trend.
Instead, players themselves take on this work. Google Sims 4 custom content, and you’ll find everything from cropped sweaters, to balayages, to nail sets. People create outfits out of real pieces they saw and liked, with some custom content coming with reference photos of what they’re replicating. I’m pretty sure I saw at least two dresses that looked just like ones from Kim Kardashian’s brand, Skims.
I find it fascinating that Sims 4 modders have the drive to keep up with trends in this way, but it all likely stems from the same drive that has us create ourselves in The Sims: we want to see ourselves represented as faithfully as possible in the game, down to the clothes and makeup we wear. Even if EA doesn’t want to, or can’t, keep up with fashion trends in its games, the fanbase has established itself as willing and able to do so on their behalf. Because of them, we had increasingly diverse skin tones, a wider range of hairstyles for Black and brown Sims, and outfits that weren’t painfully mid – all of this long before The Sims was able to provide the same. Modders keep the Sims community thriving, and they deserve more credit.