Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion
Believe it or not, there are still some people who don't think mesh can revolutionize Second Life fashion. Admittedly, both designing and wearing mesh can be a huge pain right now, and I absolutely don't think everything needs to be mesh for to look good, but there are some clothing items that really demand it. Parkas and bulky coats are a perfect example. In the bad old days, these coats were made of tori prims looped around your avatar's limbs like the Michelin Man. Sculpties improved this some, but the prim shapes made creating unisex items incredibly difficult. Even with painstaking adjustments to the prims, certain animations or poses would mess up your look entirely.
DECO's new mesh-based Parkas suffer from none of this. [Click here to teleport to DECO this Friday]. This coat is exactly how a parka should look, and exactly how they couldn't look before the advent of mesh. It's very well textured, as good as unisex, and parkas are always so bulky that a lot of the shape issues that make wearing mesh so frustrating for some of us get literally swallowed up in the heavily-padded figure of this coat, just as they would in real life. A parka may not be the sexiest winter coat choice, but as far as I'm concerned, the quality of this piece is sexy in itself!
A note on the picture, since I'm sure you're wondering...:
Every time I write about seasonal cold-weather clothing, I feel a little pang for SL fashionistas of the Southern hemisphere, who must be rolling their eyes every time the fashion world (and SL in general) bends over backwards to accommodate the seasonal styles of the North. So while I will be covering my favourite coats over the next few weeks, I'll also offer an olive branch to those of you moving into the Southern Summer by shooting some sweltering, summery beach locations. We'll all be pretty sick of seeing snow soon anyway!
Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
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