Outfits, and what the style packs tell you

Rockstar hasn't explained the clothing system, but it has photographed a lot of it, because two of the paid packs are mostly wardrobes.

The Ultimate Edition comes with a set called Vice City Style, shown across five images on both leads. The Vintage Vice City Pack pre-order bonus adds period outfits and hairstyles for both leads alongside the '55 Vapid Stanier. It's a pre-order bonus on both editions, so you don't need the Ultimate Edition for it.

The PlayStation Store listing describes Vice City Style as outfits, hairstyles, tattoos "and more" for Jason and Lucia, so it's more than a wardrobe. The hair and tattoo side runs through Sara's Salon and Electric Fang Tattoo, two of the five Special Destinations the Ultimate Edition adds.

The modern set

Loose patterned shirts, linen, tiger-print boots, cropped jackets and a lot of unstructured tailoring. It's beach money, not office money, and that's the right read on the city.

The outfits are shot as outfits, styled head to toe on both characters, where a shop page would lay them out as a grid of individual garments. Rockstar's presenting finished looks, not an inventory of parts.

The eighties set

The Vintage pack goes somewhere else entirely. Sequinned red, wide lapels, feathered hair, blue eyeshadow, and a couple photographed outside the Ocean View Hotel in full eighties dress.

This is the clever part of the pack. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was set in 1986. Selling eighties clothing for a modern-day game lets people dress as the old game inside the new one, and Rockstar doesn't have to build a period setting to do it.

Three things the photos give away

Three things are visible without Rockstar saying a word.

• Layering exists. Shirts open over vests, jackets over cropped tops, and shirts tied at the waist all show up across the sets.
• Both characters share the system. Every pack is shown on Jason and Lucia, so it isn't a Lucia-only feature.
• Branded in-world clothing is a category. Goodtime Gear appears as its own labelled item, worn in front of a Vice City mural. That's the series' long habit of selling you a shirt for a fictional company. The store listing says the Goodtime Gear collection is inspired by Macca the Gator, a character from in-game TV.

Clothes are evidence now

Your clothing is a tracked item in the evidence system. The police build a description from what you were wearing, and changing clothes makes that description useless.

So a wardrobe stops being decoration and becomes equipment. A distinctive outfit is a liability during a job and an asset afterwards, and owning more than one set of clothes starts to count for something beyond looks.

Edge's cover feature (29 October), from a demo Rockstar ran for the magazine, backs this up: changing clothes makes you harder for the police to recognise. Nobody's seen yet whether the game tracks this garment by garment or as a single outfit slot.

A shop to buy them in

The Ultimate Edition's store listing names one clothing shop outright. Stock 305 is described as a streetwear spot in Stockyard with unique looks for both characters. It's one of the five Special Destinations, so it's tied to the Ultimate Edition.

That clothes-shop clip isn't real

You might have seen a TikTok of Lucia browsing a clothes shop, posted by someone claiming to be playing early on PS5. Nobody's playing it early. There's no beta or demo, a lot of people think the clip's AI, and the links that come with this stuff are usually malware. We wrote up how the scam works.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't described the clothing system itself, or said whether you can save outfits as sets. Stock 305 is the only clothing shop it's named, and Goodtime Gear is a clothing line, so we don't know what other shops there are or whether Standard Edition players get a streetwear shop of their own. Most of the above is read off photographs of paid content and the store listing's short descriptions.

Related: tattoos, hair and clothing.