New World Notes

SL Fashion Drama: Over-the-Top, or Just Over-Exposed?

Fashionista blogger Ms. Cajsa Lilliehook has a smart response to my challenge to discuss this topic: "The Second Life fashion scene is infamous for negative interpersonal drama. Do you think it's possible to make it less so, and if so, how?" However, she rejects the premise of my question:

I do not think that the fashion community has more drama than other communities in Second Life... I think the main reason that the fashion community is wrongly judged to be drama-ridden is that more than any other community it has a very public media...

Much more here. She's definitely right that the SL fashion community has an astoundingly huge media footprint. (After all, the top Second Life fashion blog is more influential than the Los Angeles Times' own fashion blog, for God's sake.) She also right that other Second Life sub-communities have their own dramas -- it even breaks out in the Lindens' bug tracking software. ("Have you read the JIRA’s about SL and coding and bugs? The Drama!!!")

That acknowledged (and I say this as someone who tries to write about every aspect of mainstream SL society), I still believe SL fashion is the epicenter of metaverse drama.  Of course there's drama potential inherent in all Second Life, where there's emotional investment in our avatars and the sense of inhabiting a shared space.  But with SL fashion, this feeling is even further heightened by the fact that the industry is also economically lucrative, with the top creators earning in excess of six figures in US$, and then it's still further elevated by the focus on female beauty, on who is fashionable and pretty, and who is not -- a touchy topic in every reality, for reasons to many and complex too discuss here.

In any case, is there a way to dampen the fires of SL fashion drama? Cajsa notes the high level of participation and esprit de corps fashionistas show contributing to and promoting the Hair Expo and other events that benefit real world non-profits. (There's drama even in those, I can assure you, but it is at least muted.) With even more events like that, I have to think we'd see still less drama.

Second Life Fashion Inspired by *Secretary*

Responding to my SL blogger challenge to create an SL photo spread inspired by a film, Gorgeous Yongho of Juicy Bomb comes out with this sweetly kinky concoction, a tribute to the cult movie Secretary. "I had to draw in some of the skirt using Photoshop," Ms. Yongho notes, "since crawling poses are not skirt friendly." Sounds like a project for pose creators.

Responding to the same challenge in his own inimitable way, Adric Antfarm created a screenshot spread inspired by the "miner's son takes up dancing" comedy Billy Elliot. Or, uh, something.

Second Life Fashion For Zombie Hunters

For the style-minded fan of Left 4 Dead, Delora Starbrook of Shopping Cart Disco presents this fashionable zombie-hunting ensemble. Sort of suggests a backstory where a night of club hopping in the big city was cut short by a sudden infestation of the undead. I love the merger of video game conceits and SL fashion; other examples include Iris Ophelia in Japanese cosplay wear, and City of Heroes-inspired outfits. What are other videogame-meets-metaverse fashion deserves more coverage in NWN?

How to Take Dramatically Lit SL Photos the Cajsa Way

What you're looking at above is part of a much larger series of avatar portraits by SL photographer Cajsa Lilliehook, depicting her friends and acquaintances in two different WindLight settings -- hence its title, "double take". Last night she invited me to her underwater studio (more on that later) to include me in the series. The results are moody and evocative, so I asked her how she did them.

"I generally use Torley's WindLight settings," Cajsa explains, as she photographs me. Among them are TEak WEak, Slips Through Walls, Coral Reef, and That Spells Moon. (You can get those and more here.) She occasionally uses 2026, made by Mescaline Tammas, available here. For my portraits, she used 2026, and Bridge Opera.

"Then I fiddle, change the East Angle to highlight half the face, drop Gamma way down because I like to shoot really dark. If I cannot get it as dark as I want, I will use two Photoshop... I will adjust lightness and I will use the Ghost filter that is free from Flaming Pear. (Available here.) "I try to do as little as possible in Photoshop."

Then there's one last eccentric technique of hers: "[L]astly I shoot underwater, because I like the way it makes the light work and think it is kinder to skin. I think it gives me more control. But that could be in my head." Then again, it does make for a more tranquil photo shoot. 

Virtual Hair Benefit For Real World Kids With Hair Loss

The fourth annual Hair Fair is hitting Second Life on June 20th; it's the fashion extravaganza where profits from sales of SL hair attachments are donated to Locks of Love, a real world non-profit that gives hair pieces to kids undergoing chemotherapy and other medical crises. To get involved, here's the official site. (A related Flickr hair photography contest just launched.) Along with being a great fundraiser, it's an opportunity to marvel at the range of creativity around this single avatar enhancement. In previous years, the kind of hair pieces donated to the fundraiser ranged from the dramatic and glamorous to the uniquely surreal; one of the top sellers in 2008 was this blue wig which supported a growing Cthulu baby fetus. Hat tip: Harper Ganesvoort, who has much more info.

Update, 3:10pm: A reader points out Locks' FAQ says, "Most of our recipients suffer from alopecia areata. Others have experienced hair loss from radiation therapy and chemotherapy, severe burns or trauma, and various other genetic and dermatological conditions." Changed the title accordingly. Read more about the non-profit (including criticisms of its operation) on Wikipedia.

Can Female Avatars Ever Escape the Expectations of Real World Women?

SL Fashion blog Shopping Cart Disco has a fascinating post and discussion thread over yet another controversy circling around the size of a female avatar. Almost exactly a year ago, the rage was over an SL group promoting anorexic-looking women (real and virtual.) This time, the controversy is a bit more complex, since it deals with a Second Life fashion designer advertising for models who are extremely thin, or reconfigured to look that way, with an avatar's Height, Body Fat, and other physical attributes numerically specified. (At left, two versions of Ms. Ryker Beck, the one at right formed to suit this designer's standards.) Many fashionistas are outraged at the job offer; in the post's comment thread, one writes, "[I] personally think this is mental sickness, has nothing to do with being pretty anymore. Womans do need curves."

Far worse is said, not usually about real women or the social pressures they face, but about 3D graphic representations of women. Opinions cut the other way, of course: In an SL Universe forum discussion over the same topic, for instance, a woman who describes herself as a recovering bulimic and anorexic (who has a full-figured avatar to boot), dismisses the rancor: "To compare SL fashion to RL fashion is idiotic. To compare SL avatar size to influence over people's RL self images is equally idiotic."  Maybe so, but the mere fact that so many are angry suggests it's a reality that needs to be understood.  In that vein, let me suggest a counter-example:  If the fashion designer under fire announced that she was looking for extremely thin Elf women models, would the fury be just as keen?

Hetero Eye For The Straight Avatar Guy

Gauge Laville of We Hate What You're Wearing has some solid tips for the fashion-conscious, budget-aware straight male avatar. The fashion model on the left got that way with just L$51, and the dude adjacent him, L$2699L. Mr. Laville's advice stems from this realization of his: Well-dressed men in SL are "1. Alts. Many of which were created by female residents. 2. Gay men. 3. Myself, and about five other straight men." Maybe a debatable breakdown, but dig the T-shirt with the bullet hole in the heart.

Iris Ophelia Talks Asian Metaverse Style On Machinima-Based Fashion TV Show

NWN style correspondent Iris Ophelia has been on semi-hiatus to deal with those irksome real world necessities, but she'll be back writing here soon (and rumor has it, she's got a lot on her mind.) Meantime, here she is visiting Angie Mornington of Fabulous Fashion TV, mainly talking about the SL styles of Asian designers which often go unnoticed in the English-centric part of the metaverse. Just as interesting to me is the polish and pizazz of the show itself; the production values and presentation are about on par with a basic cable TV show, this one just happens to be shot as machinima in Second Life. Still find the VoIP lip sync off-putting, though.

Create Second Life Images The Achariya Way

Achariya Rezak creates great SL-based images (as sexily thumbnailed here), and now she's assembled her guide to doing so in a recent blog post, a series of post-processing/Photoshop steps which weaves together tips from several other SL fashionistas. That includes some advice for displaying these images in blog software, such as: "If you use something WYSIWYG like Wordpress, make sure you put a hard return under your images, or fuss with image settings so that words kern around them. It looks like shite when your images hang out haphazardly with words going every which way." Read it all here. Image credit: Ms. Rezak, a portrait of a Sumomo Kawashima tattoo set.

Why I'm Fascinated By Virtual Fashion Disasters

Via Peter Stindberg's Flickr stream

Here's a glorious example of a face light gone horribly wrong, an invisible attachment meant to gently illuminate the avatar's profile-- but above, acting more like a beacon for ships lost at sea. (Duly spotted and reported by Peter Stindberg.)  There are so many examples of avatar fashion gone awry, whole SL blogs are devoted to the topic. I'm fascinated by them, because they're ongoing proof of the intense self-identity we invest in our avatars. In the real world, we can generally tell when a clothing or hair style looks bad on others, but when it comes to something we're wearing, we're often the last to know. And surprisingly, that seems to be true of our avatars too. Established Residents smile at newbie Resident fashion disasters, but if they're wise, they don't laugh scornfully, because most of us also had a painful learning curve, where we worked to match what we wanted our avatar to look like, with the actual results. For the first couple years, for instance, my avatar had utter fail hair (and for that matter, I doubt it'd win any prizes now.)