Happy 2018 everyone! I hope the new year is off to a great start for you all. I thought it would be fun to go back and reminisce about the last decade of fashion in Second Life and how it has evolved.
As you may know, I joined Second Life in May of 2007 and then started blogging about it in December of 2007. So I’ve been blogging for a decade now. The first social network I joined with my Second Life avatar was of course flickr and have been sharing my images on there since July of 2007 so I thought it would be fun to go back in my stream and make an album of images I shared that represented the state of fashion in Second Life at that time. Not necessarily just clothing, but skins, hair, jewelry etc… and items that resonated with me, that I really enjoyed wearing. You can click over and check out this album on my flickr, I have around 130 images in it so far: Second Life Fashion Over the Years I picked one picture per year from this album and created the image above and let me tell you, it was a difficult task to pick just one!
In 2007 I recall wearing mainly texture clothing that was painted on to the avatar. There were also prims and sculpts and flexi pieces that you could attach to enhance your clothing. The mini skirts with the prim in the crotch area, like in my 2008 picture, were quite popular back then.
In 2011 we got mesh so my pictures in the image from 2012 are all in mesh clothing. The first year there were a lot of hurdles to jump through to get mesh to fit our bodies properly or be able to combine different mesh clothing to create outfits like hat+hair and jackets+shirts, etc… We were so used to being able to resize, modify and change prims and sculpts to our liking that fighting with mesh became a big struggle but at the same time, the quality of the mesh items and texturing on them was hard to let go of.
In 2013 we got materials! Materials gave us more shine, bumps, and realistic texturing on our skins and clothing. Now we love playing with the materials sliders on our mesh bodies and heads to get just the right amount of glowing and glistening skin.
In 2014 we got fitmesh! Fitmesh allowed us to deform mesh items using collision bones in order to help us fit them better. Since then we started getting some of the first mesh body releases such as SLink Physique and Maitreya Lara.
In 2016 we got Bento! Bento gave us additional bones in the Second Life avatar skeleton, which supported both rigging and animation. Since then not only did we get animated fingers but also bento heads! With bento heads, not only did we get the ability to modify the looks of our mesh heads, but we also got even better bento animations for them. I also love all of the new bento AOs and dances we have available on the grid now.
In 2018 I am hoping to see Animesh hit the main viewer. Animesh is a new Second Life feature that will allow independent objects to use rigged mesh and animations, just as you see today with mesh avatars. This means that you can now have wild animals, pets, vehicles, scenery features and other objects that play animations!
I love how much Second Life has evolved and changed over the years and I’m looking forward to seeing even more updates and changes in the coming years. I’ll continue to add to my Second Life Fashion Over the Years flickr album whenever I feel a picture I took belongs in there. I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane. Feel free to share some of your favorite pictures of items from previous years in the comments of this post.
Here is a slideshow of my Second Life Fashion Over the Years flickr album:
Created with flickr slideshow.
Of course I’ve also done this post in vlog format as well, so click over to YouTube to check out my video:
https://youtu.be/1xwaHsvEc54
All the best for 2018! <3
