
Iris Ophelia interviews Ms. Trollop
Back in my Linden Lab days, I once put together an Avatar-Based Fashion Expo, and the way I ran it was just about the worst mistake I ever made. The idea was to have residents nominate and vote on the best in SL fashion, which I'd then cover on New World Notes. And while the styles which made the cut were great, the selection process was an emotional bloodbath, with expo nominees and their friends accusing each other of ballot stuffing and backroom lobbying, spurring one contestant to withdraw altogether, rather than endure the ongoing skirmish, while another privately messaged me with the plea, "I'm being killed here."
And that was back in 2004, even before the prospect of making a real life living from the sale of avatar fashion was fully manifest. Now it is, with the very top designers taking an estimated $50,000-70,000 yearly, when their L$ earning are converted to cash. Unsurprisingly, that seems to have made the pressures and feuds even more acute, especially for the top SL fashion blogs and publications. I noted that when Second Style editor Celebrity Trollop posted a transparency policy on her blog, and during my panel at SLCC, which included Lo Jacobs, co-editor of Pixel Pinup and co-host of The Goods SL fashion podcast, who confirmed the sense that Second Life fashion was, like the real garment industry, a roiling cauldron of melodramatic hyper-competitiveness.
All this being alien territory for me, I asked Iris Ophelia, a talented regular contributor to several top SL fashion publications, along with her own charming blog, to file an NWN report on the scene from this high-drama world.