Shopping and the importance of wearing underwear
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One of the wonderful things about Second Life is that you get to make many different ‘you’s.
That is, you can have many different clothing outfits and body shapes (including face), different hair and different coloured framed and frame-less glasses if you want.
So the ‘me’ I’ve created for Second Life is the result of much experimentation and purchase. The body shape is ‘home grown’ (i.e. I designed it from the original mannequin you get when you join Second Life.
But the clothing, the hair, the glasses — all are ‘purchased’ from designers, because some of the stuff is just too hard to make yourself at first. I had a go at designing my own t-shirt and it is not as easy as it looks.
Thankfully it doesn’t look too bad once it is on, but the edges of it are undefined and look like the t-shirt has been spray-painted on.
Which is okay-ish for boys, but looks wonderful on some of the women.
Isabella Scheflo is a colleague here in Adelaide and she generously agreed to model a CommsCafe t-shirt and have a few photos taken inside the CommsCafe.
As you can see, she looks better in it that I do.
And that is where (wear?) the girls can have far more fun in Second Life than the boys. There are plenty of shops catering to men — hair, body shape, face shape, accessories, clothes — but the ratio must be at least 10:1 in favour of girl shops to boy shops.
The girls can have a lifetime of shopping — clothes, colours, fit, mix-and-match — that we boys (were we to be into shopping, which I am definitely not) could only dream of. No doubt there is a car parts mall in Second Life where boys can hang out and drool over cool mag wheels, custom exhausts, flare kits, skirts, neons, and so on. But I haven’t gone looking and it’s very doubtful that I will.
Much as in the First Life, shopping is becoming more and more about reputation and word of mouth recommendation. Someone I met was wearing cool hair, I asked him about it, he gave me a landmark card (with the shop’s address on it) and so when I had some free time and some spare L$ I wandered on over and bought me a cool mop for my head. 
My aforementioned friend Isabella has reportedly spent hours and hours in Second Life, wandering from mall to mall in search of clothing, body shapes, different faces and skin tones, hair… She estimates that she’s spent over L$3,000 on stuff. Which isn’t that much really — about US$12.
For that US$12 she has apparently had hours of fun wandering the malls, comparing the clothes and colours and ‘looks’.
“Sounds tedious” said Marvin the Paranoid Android.
However, all of the clothes and swapping thereof reminds me of a very important point that Kate raised recently, and which I realised is absolutely true. Make sure you have underwear on your avatar before you start swapping clothes around. Nothing is as embarrassing as trying on a just-purchased outfit in the middle of the shop and realising you forgot to put your boxers on!
Apparently it is even worse if you have purchased a ’shape’ for your avatar — nearly all of the shapes are anatomically correct, in every important detail. Thankfully my avatar didn’t come with a ‘pound of sausages’ with which to fill the nice imitation leopard skin pose pouch I got as a freebie from one retailer. But I confess that I did purchase a ’sizeable something’ from one of the adult shops — but thankfully I have to actually ‘put’ it on to wear it; it doesn’t normally ‘attach’ itself without you asking.
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