SL fashion doyenne Gorgeous Yongho has a fun project that's also very instructive about the economic state of virtual fashion in Second Life: the Newbie Style Challenge, in which she dares other SL fashionistas to create and style a new avatar for less than L$550L (around USD $2.50). She has some rules to prevent cheating (like "You cannot ask your designer friends to send you stuff"), so this is basically an accurate representation of what you can buy fashion-wise in SL for less than L$550.
You can see the results submitted by folks who rose to the challenge linked in the comments of her blog post. At right is detail from one of my favorites, a hipster look by Seraph Kegel. Most of the other examples look about as good as what you'd see on avatars who'd paid twice or three times as much for their look (maybe more). In this sense, Second Life's fashion economy seems quite similar to the real world: You can go into a high end boutique and spend four figures to get a new look, but if you're willing to scout for discounts, you can get about as glam for much less.
You can send Gogo your own noobie submission, by the way, until the end of this year. Here's all the details.
lol edit-wellies!
Posted by: zuzu P | Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:18 PM