Men's Second Style

RL’s been keeping me busy so I’ll try to make this short and sweet. Crimson Shadow has a freebie up till the end of the week. It’s a full outfit: shirts, pants, gloves, belt, bracelet, armband, piercings, socks, and shoes. It kinda speaks for itself. I was having SL issues and a) couldn’t attach my face lamp or b) change sky settings, so I’m sorry the pics are kinda dark.

As a word of warning, the piercings (you can see them after the cut below) attach to the skull. For most people, this means your hair will go poof. The ad art indicates this outfit was meant to worn bald, but I’d rather have a full head of hair since without it.. well.. my head’ll get cold. I used the following little trick to make repositioning the piercing from another attachment point easier. Since the prim parts of the outfit (bracelet, armband, piercing, and shoes) are all copyable, you can first make a copy of the piercing and then attach the original to skull where it wants to be while attaching the copy to another point (I used the left ear). Using this method, you can use the skull attachment as a reference as you adjust the copy into place before reattaching hair (so the former skull attachment poofs). Read the rest of this entry »

LeeZu Baxter has started making men’s clothes; this is good news. Among the pieces at her new island, To The Nines, you’ll find this complete outfit, called JoJO. It’s a luxurious affair, with the broad pinstripes on the trousers matched by bands of stripes and ribs on the coat, including on the magnificently tall stand-up prim collar. (As usual, click on any of the photos to see a larger version.)
The long coat is formed with one of those flexiprims that attaches from the chest. If you’ve followed conversations in the comments to Express’s articles, you’ll know that some of us have trouble with getting these to fit. I approached with some caution, but LeeZu helped by offering to wear my ‘shape’ and try it on. I had no problem at all with JoJO — it worked right out of the box. Read the rest of this entry »

Especially now that I’m no longer in the competition, I figured why not discuss the “freebie” version of my entry to the Muism Contest. The majority of the items will of course come from Muism, but a bunch of others come from other spots.

To figure out what to wear, I decided to go through all the Muism freebies I’d collected over time. My first Muism product I ever tried on was their Xmas gift from last year, a red suit. I don’t get to wear that suit often enough. Next, I put on their racing jacket (which is still available, btw — it was recently added to the archives again). See, I told you it’d be handy in a costume .Anyway, I noticed a bit of a common trend — Muism seems to like red in freebies. Perhaps I’m (actually I know I am) taking a bad sample space, but I decided to try on a few other red things. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re in the market for clever prim accessories to complete an outfit (or push it over the top), you could do far worse than to check out the creations of Jonny Petrova at his shop, Endless Nameless Designs.  His overall style seems to be kind of generalized urban gritty punk, but there are some truly beautiful and classy items in the mix too.  For no particular reason–okay, actually I worked everything around the belt–I’ve chosen to focus on a few of his pieces that fit into a “music” theme.

Jonny’s beautifully detailed Fret Belt (L$75 L$175), shown at right, comes in four sizes or configurations: male, female, giant and tiny.  It’s moddable, so you can resize and fit according to your own preferences, but it’s nice to have a choice of starting points–I don’t know about you, but this simplifies my life.  The main loop of the belt is detailed to resemble a guitar’s fretboard, complete with frets and strings, with the buckle assembly standing in for the guitar’s headstock.  This is a gorgeous design, perfect for the rock star in your life, and at 222 prims (I think I’ve got that right) it joins the pantheon of ultra-high-prim belts in my inventory. Read the rest of this entry »

So, when I made that horribly long post a week or two back I said I’d hoped I hadn’t forgotten anything. I did. But don’t worry, forgetting made this post a lot better. I probably wasted just about all my luck on lucky chairs, but I managed to grab three E’s from two chairs in a span of 24 hours while I was at two stores.

So what I forgot was the Camo Tank from F.A.T. Designz that I picked up a few weeks ago. I only remembered the tank when I received a reminder that F.A.T. Designz was celebrating its first birthday with a weekend-long party. The part I find coolest is that the designer, Alfred Kabuki, has pushed his designs back into real life as well. Which means you can tell the real world what you do to the dj’s wife just like in SL. On top of having relatively reasonable prices (most products from my glance last weekend in the 80 to 110L range) the store also has a lucky chair and camper chairs for extra free stuff. Both switch between various products. I happened to see an “E” on the chair and received the RAW I pants when I checked to see if the tank was still out. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you might have been wondering when that workaholic Ryan would be going on vacation again…it’s this week.  Sean and I are leavin’ on a jet plane for New Orleans tomorrow morning, and we won’t be back until May 7.  So, sad but true, you won’t be hearing much from me in the meanwhile.  Try to refrain from sending IMs as they’ll surely cap while I’m away.  You are more than welcome to e-mail me at ryandarraghsl (at) gmail dot com, and who knows?–I might even respond. 

I’ve got one more post in the works for today or this evening, and I’ll try to get pictures taken and notes made for one or two more that I can work on during the very occasional vacation “downtime” (it does happen).  Express and Mr. Oh will keep you informed and entertained while I’m away, so do check in.  Look forward to a well rested Ryan when I get back!

Literally as well as figuratively right next door to Artilleri, designer Floatie Hock’s Hell Bop Bar and Clothing Garage in Saimaa sells retro clothes at great prices.

My favourite has to be this olive-coloured shirt. Perfect for bowling, but without any wordy or cheesecake logos, just this screaming tiki figurine (click the photo to enlarge), the 1950s olive colour and broad black stripe up the middle. Superb. It’s called Bob Olive Shirt and it comes on shirt- and jacket-layers for only L$75. Read the rest of this entry »

I was in a barren and empty sim, the hour was late and it was dark (I had forced midnight) when a mysterious message urgently demanded my attention. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it: for the next issue of Second Style, highlight some of the best individual designs in SL fashion of the last twelve months. This IM will self-destruct in ten seconds. Nine. Eight….”

I logged out quickly, but not before triggering a sly smile ( }:-> ). I knew that this assignment would challenge me like no other, and I would have to rely on all my skills and training. How to select just a handful of items from the many released over the past year? It seemed…impossible.

Hopefully my superiors will agree that I have succeeded. All of these creations epitomize the best of what SL design has to offer. In chronological order by month of release: Read the rest of this entry »

Now, I don’t mean “guywear” in the sense that it’s clothing Lloyd Dobler would wear.  (“The world is full of guys.  Don’t be a guy.  Be a man.”)  It’s just that “menswear” seemed somehow not quite right here.  Yes, I’m making it up as I go along.  Anyway, Lloyd might well wear some of this stuff.  I’m thinking by the end of the movie.

I seem to recall that Garbage Prototype had dropped one or two vague hints during the two months or so it took him to redesign and rebuild his shop and completely revamp his clothing and body lines for men and women. I think he just likes to tease like that. This is the kind of thing that just nags away at me from the back of my brain, kind of like my mother, or my conscience if I had one, or the approach of Christmas when I was a kid. I had also visited his website and seen his teaser video, so I knew that interesting things were afoot at the Circle-K.  When he finally said, “Okay, I’m not ready to open yet, but come and take a look if you want to!”–I most definitely wanted to.

I honestly don’t know what my expectations were. I didn’t expect the shop’s casually elegant atmosphere to so slyly reflect Garbage’s creative approach. I know that I was surprised by some of the designs–wow, Garbage did a suit?–and impressed by the range of items and choice of colors. As a collection it felt focused, consistent, and very much an expression of a designer’s vision. I couldn’t wait to pick his brain. Read the rest of this entry »

Thing is, sometimes you just want simple. Simple and comfortable. Simple and comfortable and quality. It’s the last one that’s often the difficulty. Understandably, great designers tend to tackle difficult things — complex pieces with many layers and brocades and stripes and often prim add-ons. And, yeah, we love ‘em. But sometimes, you just want simple.

So here’s a set. Alphamale is an up-and-coming shop, maybe even an up-market-and-coming-on-strong shop. Yelmer Pfeffer is the main alphamale and his partner, Mariska Simons, runs Blacklace next door. They’ve been up and running for months, but when I stopped in this week, they were going through an impressive and extensive remodelling and an expansion that included culling older pieces with which Yelmer was no longer satisfied. He was wearing some excellent blue jeans with a blue t-shirt. I turned immediately to the vendors but bought this colour instead. It’s a set they call, simply enough, Brown Jeans with Two Tees. And the contents are exactly as stated. Read the rest of this entry »