Glitch: A Disruptor In Battle, And Fashion.

 

Glitch’s design in Marathon presents a vision of futurism rooted less in speculative technology and more in contemporary fashion language. Their form, palette, and motifs reflect ongoing trends in modern minimalism, streetwear, and post-internet fashion culture. Instead of dressing a character for combat, the design treats the body as a site of composition, identity, and cultural reference.

Glitch’s silhouette is immediately legible because it doesn't try to impress with bulk. There is no heroic exaggeration here, no chest-forward dominance, no armor pretending to be anatomy. Instead, their body is long, narrow, and strangely restrained. The eye is pulled vertically, not outward. This is a minimalist body; built to weave through spaces rather than occupy them.

The white crewneck layer is doing a lot of work here; It hangs off the back with a softness that feels subversive in a genre notably obsessed with hardness. It behaves like a coat, not a uniform. It flutters, it trails, and consequentially introduces dead space. Functionally, this would be a liability. Here, it feels intentional, like a garment designed to be seen in motion as opposed to trusted in combat. And Glitch should never be trusted in combat.

Underneath, the black torso chest plate sits on the body like a second skin. It tries to disappear into the form. The flatness of it, the way it blends into the torso, recalls contemporary minimalist fashion that treats clothing as supplementary architecture. This is not armor pretending to be clothing. It is clothing pretending not to care whether it is armor. Even if one does acknowledge it as militarist, its employment is considerably more for the shell's form factor as opposed to functional defensive material.

The military elements are present, but they are neutered. Grenades, straps, clips, and packs appear throughout the design, yet none of them feel issued. They feel styled. Cargo pants, cross body bags, and the early 2020s explosion of the fanny-pack as a signal of utilitarianism. Their placement follows rhythm and balance more than logic. This level of shit in the way of one's own articulation would be restrictive. This is the fashion-world appropriation of military utility, where function is stripped of authority and reintroduced as aesthetic reference. The gear is not there to suggest discipline or preparedness. It is there to suggest fluency.

Their lower half completes the silhouette. The legs are uninterrupted and lean, extending the vertical line, while the shoes are oversized enough to ground the whole thing. They are not dissimilar to the advent of oversized shoes (see: Big Red Boot, Moon Boots, etc). This is a streetwear proportion. This is a stance. The body looks composed and sculpted before it looks dangerous, and that feels very much like the point. 

If the silhouette is restrained and even misleading, the color is not subtle, and announces what would otherwise be casual and unassuming.

Glitch’s palette is aggressive in its clarity. White, black, blue, magenta, and neon yellow are deployed in hard blocks with no interest in realism. Nothing is muddied. Nothing is aged. This is not a future filtered through decay or corrosion. It is a future rendered cleanly, like a graphic (enter, Bungie's coined "graphic realism" term). I find this point interesting from a societal outlook. When the original Marathon trilogy released, it was all but a guarantee in the 90s and towards Y2K that the future would come in the form of rust and structural decay. In contrast, in the 2020s we've seen an increasing number of realizations of the future that come in the form of minimalist, corporate sterilization. The future is not dirty and decayed, it's clean, far too clean, the remnants of humanity are washed away in favor of an impeccable or idyllic corporate utopia.

This places them firmly in conversation with neo-futurism and not so much traditional cyberpunk. Where older cyberpunk aesthetics relied on grime, flicker, and environmental storytelling, Glitch operates more like an interface. Their colors define zones. They segment the body. They tell you where to look and how to read them at a distance.

The neon yellow elements are especially telling. They do not blend. They interrupt. The boots and equipment act like punctuation marks, pulling attention downward or outward in ways that feel closer to runway styling than battlefield fatigues. These choices make their body readable as a composition. The colors stand in direct contrast to their actual physique; while they are structurally vertical, the colors suggest wider space. Together, Glitch becomes an obnoxious traffic cone in the middle of a hectic battlefield.

The blue and magenta sleeves introduce asymmetry without chaos. They frame the arms as modular units, reinforcing the idea that this body is assembled, even slightly uncanny. Color here functions structurally. It replaces texture. It replaces narrative. It makes the form legible instantly. They are not unlike many modern runway additions of forearm length gloves that harken back to early 20th century retro-futurism or high society fashion. However, even here, the added bulk makes them appear subversive.

What is most striking is how contemporary the palette feels. There is no nostalgia here. This is hardly an homage to 1980s neon futurism. It feels pulled from digital branding, experimental footwear, and post modern fashion spaces that already exist. The future Glitch represents does not feel speculative. It feels current. Rather, it feels like what the current considers the future to be.

There is also something quietly confrontational about Glitch’s head/hair, and it might be the most telling part of the design.

The spiked hair is not incidental. It is too deliberate, too exaggerated, to be written off as simply “punk.” The shape reads closer to liberty spikes than to cyber/punk bedhead, and that distinction matters. Liberty spikes have always carried a confrontational energy. They are impractical, time-consuming, and designed to be noticed. They exist to reject neutrality. On Glitch, the spikes turn their silhouette upward, breaking the clean vertical line of the body with something chaotic and aggressive. It is the one place where structural design defies restraint.

The surface language of Glitch’s design places them squarely within the orbit of contemporary fashion authority.

The numbers, symbols, and glyphs scattered across their body function the same way they do in modern fashion. They do not explain. They signal. This is the lineage of Virgil Abloh (Off-White, Louis Vuitton), where industrial typography and uniform language are lifted from their original contexts and reintroduced as cultural texture. The meaning is not literal. The meaning is that meaning exists and is noteworthy simply by existing.

The emphasis on hardware and visible attachment points recalls the work of Matthew Williams (1017 ALYX 9SM, Givenchy) and the broader tech-luxury movement that treats fastening systems as statements. Clips, straps, and modular components are not hidden. They are celebrated. Construction becomes identity.

Japanese fashion influence emerges through the layering and density of ideas. This is not the minimal austerity of Japan's Yohji Yamamoto. It is closer to the experimental street scenes where maximalism and precision coexist. The design is comfortable being busy without being messy, which is a distinctly Tokyo-fashion-scene sensibility. It is a seemingly stripped back take on tech-wear and all that comes with it.

What unites these influences is a shift in how authority is communicated. Power no longer comes from polish or refinement. It comes from curation. From knowing what to take, what to remix, and what to leave visible. Glitch looks authored, bespoke, like a product of cultural literacy over institutional design. And in a world where all of the shells are institutional design at the hands of in-universe manufacturer Sekiguchi Genetics, it makes said design all the more interesting.

Glitch does not look like a soldier. They do not look like one, but having a necessary function in any gunfight deems you such. There's indeed something to be said about high fashion being funneled into functional design as more people in the real world attempt to connect lavish with actually doing something. A century ago the pinnacle of affluence was being able to sit back and lounge. Today, it is much more admirable to serve a visible function. As such, Glitch is a hallmark example of how these antithetical philosophies have come to coalesce.

Their body reflects a world where military aesthetics have been absorbed into fashion, where color communicates function, and where identity is assembled, not inherited. Bungie did not just design a runner shell. They dressed an increasingly relevant philosophy that encapsulates their function; distract, divert, disrupt.

I mean really, for what other reason would you call something a Vandal?

I've taken the liberty of including some visual examples of runway collections that I believe might've inspired Glitch's design, ranging from 90's haute couture to more recent runway examples. It's not all encompassing and certainly does not cover some of the more modern elements such as the cross body grenade holster, but I do hope you'll be able to see some similarities, especially with the color blocking and pseudo-streetwear trims.

For the Destiny 2 players who have put fashion at the forefront of their engagement with the game in its current instance, there is clearly no shortage in Bungie's upcoming outing. I do know Glitch will be given more skins that maintain their silhouette for gameplay purposes, but I do hope that, in time, Bungie finds a way to really experiment with just how much of Tau Ceti IV is rooted in Earth's very own ideas about the future.