Styling Hextech and Shimmer: The Function of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in Arcane

The animated series Arcane (2021), based on Riot Games’ League of Legends franchise, is a marked artistic victory in the intersectional world of gaming and animation and has received many accolades as a result, from both fans and critical sources. This paper will explore how Arcane purposefully employs visuals of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements to strengthen its character designs, reinforce its sociopolitical aesthetics, and visually encode the divide between the fractured cities of Piltover and Zaun.

Art Nouveau is concerned with depicting the unruly beauty of the natural world in the form of long, flowing forms. Art Deco naturally juxtaposes Art Nouveau’s visual principles with sleek geometry that reflects an age of industrial progress and modernity. Arcane uses these art history movements to separate its narrative factions and create a dichotomy that mirrors its key narratives; opulent progressiveness and exploitative decay, the body and machines, Zaun and Piltover. In tandem, punk and cyber aesthetics are intertwined with Art Nouveau and Art Deco in a stylistic choice that reinforces an anachronistic positioning of the ideological and cultural zeitgeist explored in the series. This analysis will examine how Arcane’s use of historical artistic references and visual genres serve not as just beautiful ornamental pieces but also play a key role in worldbuilding and constructing its ideological contexts.