Ugly is the New Beautiful

Having just surveyed the latest fashions for Spring, Iris Ophelia sets her sights much wider.  Why are glittering jewels considered gauche, while some of the most stylish hangouts squalid slums?  The insightful fashionista answers that and more in a thoughtful pictorial essay that highlights the gorgeousness of metaverse grime.

Ugly is the New Beautiful

by

Iris Ophelia

Sayings like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” are clichés for a reason. Not everyone will admire Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist”, not everyone will catch the coyness in Mona Lisa’s smile. There are some commonly agreed on points, though. In reality, most people would pick a sprawling mansion over a cramped loft, or would wear a silk blouse rather than a burlap sack. To an extent, this translates into the virtual world, but only in a very limited sense.

It’s not about a mansion being better than a loft; it boils down to how we perceive each one. In Second Life, spaces praised for their beauty can look like palaces or like slums. Their aesthetic appeal and what they add to the world are essentially equal. A great example of this is the popular hang out and shopping center, The Block, a place covered in graffiti and grime, where green fumes seep up from the manholes. There are many places that share this style, like Hell's Kitchen (left) and Midian City, two urban roleplay areas that rely on their immersiveness and attention to detail to succeed.

At the same time, places like Intemptesta Nox (right), designed after a European plaza-space and opera house, give the same awe-inspiring effect, but in a more traditionally beautiful way.

What makes these places digital equals? Are real opera houses and ghettos equally beautiful? In Second Life, and all virtual spaces, it takes energy, commitment, and skill to create anything well. Gold-gilded wall sconces take just as much time to make as a filthy, tagged street lamp, and there is no cost for materials, no matter how decadent or lowly.

Not all of Second Life has been built up with such care and attention. A palace, poorly constructed and poorly decorated, is no better than a hovel. Second Life’s ghettos are actually the regions of land divided
and sold at bargain prices for first-time land owners.

These expanses are full of well meaning but sloppily created buildings, and can often look very haphazard and careless. A palace, poorly constructed and poorly decorated, is no better than a hovel, after all.

This isn’t just an architectural issue, though. It all ties in very closely to Second Life’s fashion industry. Fashion in Second Life, as far as I’m concerned, is what real life fashion would be in an ideal world. It’s an almost level playing field, with no material costs, fewer short-term trends to stay on top of, and more diverse tastes being widely represented. Even the laws of physics don’t apply to Second Life fashion. What makes a particular item a success is the designer’s skill-- in the design itself, and in the execution of that design. What separates a bloody shirt and ripped pants from a business suit is the tastes of the consumers and nothing else. That shirt was bloodied carefully by a skilled hand in Photoshop. Every stain can be summed up in minutes and hours of focus and care. That same focus and care goes into the pucker around a glossy black button on a high end suit.

Another great example of this phenomenon is “bling”. In reality, the glitzy red carpet ice is always en vogue. In Second Life, the technology exists to make jewels sparkle brilliantly, so why is it that most of Second Life's fashion “upper-crust” would sooner be caught naked than be caught blinging? The simple fact is that bling is meaningless and distracting. A truly well-made accessory won’t need to bling. In real life, that beautiful sparkle is the sign of a well-cut and valuable gem, or pure and polished metals. Bling has no such meaning attached to it in Second Life. It is just a script that distracts from the design and building skills of whoever created the piece.

Beauty and quality are usually seen as inseparable from each other, but in Second Life the two have a much purer relationship. They are almost the same thing. We can appreciate a messy hairstyle because it took time and effort to get it just that way. No grease, no absent hairbrush, no rough night spent on the couch; just raw artistry. In this way, First Life garbage becomes Second Life beautiful.

All images by Iris Ophelia; male model above is Vasean Talamasca.

Visit her pose store, Orchidee-- direct teleport at this link.  And read more from Iris at her blog.

Comments

[Akela Talamasca]

Personally, I'm much more interested in grunge and grime because it more closely resembles reality. It gives a sim the appearance of actual habitation, thus making the environment feel more real.

Also, as detailed as that shiny new building might be, it takes more observational prowess to notice and properly render the accumulation of dust along an upper molding, or the patina of countless scratches along a formica tabletop.

Well-written, kitten!

[tulip Villota]

A big difference between fashion and architecture in real life and in second life seems to be the rule detail and meticulous attention defines beauty. In real life, grunge, graffiti, and battered clothing define ugliness and filth. But in SL, grunge, graffiti, and battered clothing define detailed and thorough work. Perhaps the ideas about what is beautiful in real life would change if people would accept things like graffiti and grunge fashion as art. We tend to think of these things as results of not properly caring for something that was beautiful, but in SL, they are the results of artwork.