Men's Second Style

I’m blaming Marcus for this one.  In fact, I so hold him responsible that I roped him into modeling for me…not, mind you, that I had to bully him, or even beg very hard.  It’s just that Marcus clearly knows my weaknesses, and when he dropped me a landmark and sent me an oh-so-innocent IM, I didn’t realize it but the hunt was on.  The bait in the trap he set for me was the Roma Leather Coats by Naiman Broome.  That Marcus is a devious one.

In fairness, it’s not exactly a deep, dark secret that I’ve got a thing for coats.  (Offered in evidence: links to just a few of my favorites.)  In addition to the gorgeously textured leather of the coat itself, Naiman has thoughtfully included components for several different wear options as well as some great accessory items.  The result is a coat with at least some of the flexibility of a real garment, with fewer limitations than you might expect.

The coat consists of jacket-layer coat top and flexiprim bottom, sculpted cuffs and collar, and prim shoulder tabs.  Styling and texture work aside, so far this is all pretty straightforward, right?  Ah, but this is where we start to have some real fun.  You can wear the coat both open and closed, and the collar can be worn laying flat or turned up for additional protection against the cold winds that blow down the skyscraper canyons.  Oh, and the white dress shirt I’m wearing, with sculpted collar and prim tie?  Also included.  In two versions, no less: one with a long flexi tie, for wear with the open coat, the other with a shorter tie that looks like it’s tucked under the closed coat.  Out of the box the ties are white with black and grey stripes, but they’re moddable so you can tint them (via Edit Linked Parts) to your preference–here I’ve tinted the long tie a strong blue, for contrast.  The sculptie shirt collar, when sized properly, fits nicely around the neck and sits realistically within the coat collar.  If you felt ambitious, you could also tint the shirt and its collar.  This is a great “extra.”

You also get a decorative prim dress belt buckle, which you can wear under the open coat for a bit of extra detailing.

The Roma Coats come in White, Black (which Marcus is wearing), Black Pearl, Brown (my choice) and Sand.

A few caveats…

The jacket-layer coat top is quite short and cannot be worn without the flexi coat bottom.  In fact, the bottom edge doesn’t quite meet the shirt-pants boundary, so a thin band of white shirt still showed.  This is relatively minor and would be even more so if it weren’t for the fact that the coat bottoms (as well as the cuffs and collar with long tie) are already at or near minimum size, so they can’t be sized down.  This has certain fitting consequences if you have a smaller avatar–I was unable to fit the coat bottoms as closely as I would have liked at the belted waist, so the exposed band of shirt not covered by the jacket-layer top could still be seen from certain angles, if I looked closely.  In fairness, my avatar is pretty small; this would likely be a non-issue for larger avatars, and as I recall Marcus did not have this concern.

I noticed a slight “edge” at the end of the long flexi tie, probably something to do with the alpha channel transparency.  Most will probably notice this only on close inspection.  You can of course wear the coat with another shirt (or shirt and tie) of your choice.

The buckles (both the coat bottom buckles and the separate dress belt buckle) are scripted for “always on” bling.  Personally, I’m not a fan of bling.  I usually address this personal preference by not buying items with bling that can’t be turned off, so I have pretty much zero experience at defeating built-in bling.  The pieces are moddable, though, so I thought I’d give it a try.  So far I’ve tried (1) setting the bling script to Not Running, (2) deleting the script, and (3) dropping in a couple of bling-defeater scripts, one (a script by Eric Linden simply called ‘off’) helpfully provided by Oscar and another script provided by Naiman in response to my inquiry.  So far, the bling still blings.  If anyone has any other ideas, suggestions, educated guesses or brilliant insights, I’d love to hear ‘em.

Permissions are Modify / No Copy / Transfer.  No demo for the coat was available–not especially odd, although it would be nice.  I didn’t see demos for Naiman’s shoes, either, and that is unusual.

Available for L$500 at NAIMA Fashion (Lagoon 87, 11, 21).