Meet KK Jewell: Second Life Architecture Advocate, Real Life Helmut Newton Model

Kirsten Kiser posing for Helmut Newton; her avatar KK Jewell in SL

Often in Second Life, you'll meet someone who is roleplaying as a glamorous model, and sometimes, it turns they actually are that already. This is the case with KK Jewell (Kirsten Kiser IRL), a longtime SLer who I've known for years as leading promoter of Second Life as an architecture platform, via her site arcspace, which is one of the oldest and most visited websites for architecture. Kirsten once casually mentioned to me that she's also friends with artist David Hockney (which is why his iPhone paintings are in her SL house), so I shouldn't have been surprised when I visited Harper Beresford's great blog a few months ago, and discovered that she was also a model for legendary photographer Helmut Newton. (Link possibly NSFW, as much of Helmut Newton's decadently sexy photography often is.)

"Vogue called me to ask if they could photograph at our house," Kirsten breezily explained to me when I e-mailed her about the photos. "They photographed there and, since I was around, I started talking to Helmut. I was going to architecture school at that time so I was sitting at my drafting table all day." Soon enough, she wound up on the other side of Newton's camera. (She was already friends with Newtown and his wife, June.)

As for how she wound up in arcspace and Second Life, that had more to do with what she was doing at the drafting table:

"When I started arcspace in 1999, no architects had websites and there were only a couple of other architecture magazines on the Internet so I was ahead of my time," she tells me. As for SL, "Read about it in a newspaper in Denmark and thought it could be interesting for arcspace to explore the virtual world. Now with arcspace reaching millions of readers around the world, I thought the same would happen with the virtual world, that I could create an interest [in Second Life]." After four years of doing this, even working with many well-known architects around the world, "I am having a hard time getting them interested." However, she says, "I will keep trying new approaches."

See more of Kirsten's Helmut Newtown photos and read more about her on Harper's blog.

Photo of Kirsten Kiser copyright Helmet Newton; photo KK Jewell copyright Kirsten Kiser

Comments

[Gracie Kendal]

YAY!!!! KK Rocks!!! Great story!!

[Harper Beresford]

KK is beautiful inside and out. Arcspace was one of the sponsors for Fashion for Life and the Helmut Newton sim was named in consideration of this. (KK also helped me name the other sims, including the Shulman sim, named after her friend Julian.) She has taught me so much about architecture and art and has been a delight to have as a friend. I am so glad you saw fit to do an article about her.

[Bevan]

Woots KK and Harper!