What is the Fashion Report?

The Gold Saucer is the source of several expensive cosmetic items and you might feel like you need to win the Jumbo Cactpot to afford them all. Well, in case you don’t win the lottery, the weekly Fashion Report is the slow and steady MGP paycheck that’s going to help you earn those rewards you’ve got your eye on.

With an easy 60,000 MGP payout (which you can boost with the appropriate MGP buff), you’ll be able to buy all those mounts, hairstyles, and orchestrion rolls, and you’ll look good while doing it. Well actually an NPC will just TELL you that you look good. At the very least you’ll explore some new outfit pieces to add to your dresser.

What is it? / How to Participate?

The Fashion Report is a weekly ‘contest’ in the Gold Saucer where a theme is announced, and you can present yourself in an outfit to be judged. I say ‘contest’ because you’re not really competing against other people, but rather just trying to complete the challenge that week by presenting a satisfactory look.

The theme and clues are available on Tuesday with the weekly reset, and you’ll be allowed to participate starting on Friday. Head over to Wonder Square and speak to Masked Rose to confirm the theme and clues for the week, or present yourself for judging. You can speak to Kasumi next to him for an in game explanation of the Fashion Report as well. You can present yourself for judging up to 4 times for the week, so don’t worry if you get a low score on the first try.

Clues are given for several equipment slots, and you’ll score points based on how well you matched the intended attire. While it all sounds complicated, the real focus of the contest is very simple; if you identify and wear the target glamours, you will score high enough to win. You don’t have to create an outfit that’s aesthetically pleasing, or even one that fits the overall theme. It’s just about filling those specified item slots with the correct pieces.

Masked Rose will judge you on what you appear to be wearing. You can either wear the items directly or glamour your equipment to look like them. Both will work, so do whatever makes sense for you. Personally, when I have to buy an item from an NPC vendor, I just equip it directly and then discard it after I’m done. If the item I need is rare, and/or something I already own because it looks nice, then it’s probably stored in my glamour dresser. I just head to an inn, apply the glamour, and teleport to the Gold Saucer for judging.

What are the Rewards?

You’ll be given a score out of 100 based on how good your outfit is. Specifically, you’ll earn points for wearing an item in every equipment slot, wearing the correct items to match the clues, and dyeing the pieces the correct colour. There are two important scoring thresholds: 80 points and 100 points.

Scoring a full 100 points will earn the achievement ‘You Look Marvelous III’ and the title ‘…Fashion Leader’. Aside from that one time reward, there’s no real reason to strive for 100 points every time.

If you just want your weekly MGP, you only need to hit at least 80 points, which is honestly incredibly easy. You’ll win 50,000 MGP for reaching this bar, on top of the 10,000 MGP just for participating and presenting yourself for judging. This is a relatively large payout that you should definitely grab every week if you’re trying to farm up some MGP.

This MGP payout is affected by the Gold Saucer VIP Card, so I recommend using that if you have some from your priority squadron missions. This will give you an extra 9,000 MGP from the Fashion Report alone, and then you have a two hour window to do other high-payout Gold Saucer activities like the Jumbo Cactpot. For this reason, I usually do my Fashion Report on Saturday afternoon if I have the VIP card ready to go.

There are also some cosmetic items available from Kasumi, the NPC vendor next to Masked Rose. She’ll have more items for sale based on your cumulative Fashion Report score. After a combined score of 600 points, you’ll have unlocked everything from the list.

If you care about getting this items as fast as you can, I guess that’s some small motivation to continue getting the full 100 points so it takes you six weeks total. However, it’s much easier for most weeks’ challenges to just get 80 points, and it will only delay you by another two weeks. The extra items are a pair of pants and shoes for glamour, and a few cosmetic housing items. Not any stuff I would stress about, myself.

What do I Wear?

If you’re just trying to get your 80 points for the 60,000 MGP, you only need to match two of the target item slots while making sure none of your equipment slots are completely empty. Alternatively, if you can only procure one of the target items, you can still get enough points by using a couple of the correct dyes on your equipment to make up the rest of the points.

u/kaiyoko on the ffxiv subreddit puts out a really well done infographic every Friday that provides details on acceptable items that fit the clues. Here’s an example of what one of those looks like.

The ‘Easy 100pts’ or ‘Easy 80pts’ contain the cheapest and most widely accessible options. Keep in mind that you don’t need to use dyes for the 80 point outfit if you have a second piece of equipment. For example, for the week of the infographic above, if I have easy access to the Spring Bottoms or the Tantalus Breeches, then I can just use one of those along with the Dhalmelskin Moccasins to score at least 80 points.

If you’re someone who is constantly rearranging their glamour dresser with pieces that catch your eye, it’s a good idea to look over the green dungeon gear on the list. You might already have some of these glamours and not need to buy anything extra. Quite often though, there are one or two item slots that can be filled with cheap low level vendor gear from the starting cities, so it’s never actually much work to put together your outfit.

Summary

The Fashion Report might seem daunting – I’ve had friends avoid trying it because it looks like some big time investment – but it actually only takes a few minutes every week to put together an ‘outfit’ to present to Masked Rose for judging. Personally, I think it would be nice if your overall aesthetic mattered more, since the attire often looks either totally bizarre or sometimes hardly different from what I was already wearing.

However, I’m certainly not going to complain that you can get a giant pile of MGP just for locating a single pair of pants and then dyeing your gloves and boots. It really is that easy, thanks to the contributions of u/kaiyoko and other users that test and report the target items each week.

Hopefully this alleviated any fears you had that the Fashion Report was a complex endeavor. Head over to the Gold Saucer after Friday for your weekly MGP payout. What do you think of this ‘minigame’? Do you think it could benefit from any small changes? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.