You’ll know, if you’ve followed either SL-FKK or SL Naturist, that we do like to go shopping for clothes and accessories that may complement a naturist environment.
I know that I do check the blogs regularly for what’s new and exciting.
The answer, for me, is ‘not a lot’. I’ve all the jeans, bikinis, lingerie I’ll ever need in SL, and the clothes eventually begin to look very much the same.
When I started in SL there was greater variety in the clothes available, as designers would try to reflect clothing from different cultures. As time has gone on ‘the rest of the world’ has seemingly been squeezed out by a European/American brand of ‘couture’ (as have the various sims available…Islam seems to have been erased entirely from SL, for example. I’ve been looking tonight in respect of research for a future post, and find there’s one mosque in all of SL, and that built by non-Muslims!).
Aren’t clothes designers missing a trick here? Surely there’s enough regional differences in dress codes to allow people to embrace different clothing styles for SL and offer something entirely different. Some examples of traditional dress are offered on this page.
‘But there’s not really any profit in what’s going to be a limited number of sales’, designers might say. Really? It seems to me that elements of different clothing styles can be adapted for other use in SL.
For example, my friend Omar pointed me in the direction of a shop called 10sai, which is offering a free outfit which I guess is Afghan in intent (or at least from that area of Asia).
Here he is wearing the free (L$0, no group join fee) outfit.
I like it because it’s different, it’s non-western. I also like it because there’s one element of it I can adopt for a naturist setting…
I’m sure it was never intended to be used in such a manner, that of ‘the semi-permanent towel naturists sling over their shoulder’, but it’s necessary to ‘think outside the box’.
Omar agreed! 🙂
Well, he is a SL naturist, and I met him some years ago at, I think, Su Casa Naturist. He’s not from a country where naturism is possible, officially at least, and so he uses SL as a ‘second best’, to mix with others of a like-mind.
Again, this is feeding into my ‘nudity in different societies’ research, which we’ll address soon.
Consider the following…
I saw this on a pinterest board, of traditional costumes from around the world. The dress, the necklace, the hair, the headscarf, even the paint on the woman’s face (tattoo layer, anyone?) are all ripe for designers to use and broaden the scope of their work, and again this dress could be used in a variety of SL settings, not just within and African sim or on an African styled avatar.
So why not go to it, SL designers, and excite sometimes jaded palettes with the wonderful variety of clothing the real world has to offer?
Ella
The SL Naturist 2 