Dressed to Kill @ Style Starts Here

July 26th, 2008 at 11:24am Daman Tenk

I just looked in the archives, and realised my last post was made on the 4th of February. My apologies to Ryan and to the readers. Early February, real life took a turn for me, and I’m still unwinding from it. I plan to return to my old schedule though and post at the least once a week.

One of the things that changed in this 5 month period is that Lissa Maerten’s Cattivo stopped existing and got absorbed into Style Starts Here - in cooperation with Simone Designs. A short while ago I had the pleasure of receiving a few copies of one of the outfits released under this new label. From what I’ve seen so far, this place definitely deserves its name.

The outfit I’ll be reviewing is the D2K Outfit, where D2K stands for “Dressed to Kill“. The outfit consists of a blazer, a tee shirt and a pair of jeans. The jacket is available in eight different colours. These are Navy, Olive, Slate, Copper, Khaki, Desert, Light Blue and Light Gray.

The outfit is recognisable by its clear, hand-drawn textures - even the jeans aren’t photo-sourced. Most of the time I’m not a fan of obviously photo-sourced items (though there are exceptions), so when I come upon this kind of high quality hand-drawn outfits it’s always a big bonus. The shading looks quite realistic especially. The folds and creases are all in places where I can see them form in my real world outfits as well.

Texture seams don’t seem to exist in the world of Style Starts Here. If you look at the linked picture of the light gray outfit above, you’ll see the side seam for example. No unrealistic glitch seam for this creator. It looks pretty much like a stitch in the fabric and not more than that. The same goes for the other seams, for example around the shoulders.

The jacket also incorporates sculpted prims for the sleeves and the collar. One thing I noticed with the sleeve sculptie is that when you need to make it bigger, you’ll probably have to use “edit linked parts”. That way you can resize each axis separately. It’s quite a long sculptie. If you resize it in all directions equally, it is likely to clip through your elbow if you have any poses with bent arms.

As with nearly all prim clothing, the spot  where the prims end and go over into the system clothing is definitely visible on the light coloured outfits. On the darker colours, especially navy and black, the change is barely visible at all. You can see for yourself the zoomed in detail on the light gray outfit. I think a good job was done at making the prims fit the texture as good as possible in the current Second Life engine.

The collar is made up of three prims, of which one is sculpted. My favourite part of sculpted collars is that the neckline is usually only one prim. This makes them in my opinion much easier to fit around the neck. I hope the picture on the right does the collar justice. Again, for the most flexibility possible in resizing, I used edit linked parts.

Lastly, I want to focus on the layers. I think not a single layer has gone unused in this creation to maximise combination possibilities. The pants are available as pants or underpants. The jacket and shirt are both available on all top layers and with bottoms on both lower body layers.

All of this you get for 200 L$ per set - which means one colour of the jacket, a blue shirt and the jeans. They are sold in the men’s department of Style Starts Here. The link is pointing right at the vendor, though the region is set so that you will always spawn in the center. Just walk or fly towards the big red marker. If you don’t see the marker, the men’s department is between the green flags.

Disclosure: Seen in World: Yes | Review Copy: Yes, 4 out of 5 colours shown - 1 bought | Friends List: Yes

Notes: On Daman: Skin: Hunter Espresso by Sezmra Svarog (Nora Fashions & Bodyskins). Hair: Toby by Asuka Martin (Dernier Cri). Shoes: Lowtop chucks by artoo Magneto (Akeyo). Piercings: Facial Spike set by Radical Twang (Reaction) and Industrial set by Deekay Xavier (Deeks)

Entry Filed under: Casual, Jackets, New Items, Outfits, Style Starts Here