Animal Crossing: New Horizons Clothing Customization Is The Best It's Been

There's nothing quite like rocking a fresh outfit comprised of a combat helmet and a bath towel on your island vacation. You can do that in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which we got to experience during a hands-on demo at PAX East 2020 (we've also now published our Animal Crossing: New Horizons review-in-progress). In the demo, we saw just how much the Able Sisters shop has expanded with a larger catalog of clothing and accessories--shirts, jackets, dresses, pants, skirts, hats, helmets, glasses, shoes, socks...it was pretty overwhelming to put an outfit together.

Animal Crossing has given us customization options since its inception, letting you draw your own patterns and apply them to shirts and hats (or use as wallpaper) in the original, and expanding a bit more in follow-ups City Folk and New Leaf. However, New Horizons presents the biggest suite of options for the series thus far, which you can see in the video below (between 4:53 and 6:34).

What's more is that you can preview all clothing and accessories to see how they look on your character before buying anything. It's a quick and simple way to coordinate an outfit and purchase what you want in one fell swoop. Also, every time you select a different clothing item, your villager strikes a new pose and it's the cutest thing I've ever seen in Animal Crossing.

You should note that our hands-on preview was based on a save that had several items already available, which you'd have to earn through playing the game. The Able Sisters store must be unlocked as well.

Fashion has always been a fascinating feature in games that lean into it, some of my favorites being Final Fantasy XIV and NBA 2K, especially when it goes beyond simple cosmetic items. And for a life-sim game like Animal Crossing to give us more ways to express ourselves is worth getting excited about.

Able Sisters is probably going to be racking in most of our disposable bells when the game launches for Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020. We have you covered with our roundup of everything we know about Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and for more from our extended demo, read up on how the museum has changed or why you'll probably want to be a snitch on your island.