Does this outfit make me look fat?

For my final project topic, I decided to investigate clothing styles of avatars in Second Life. After attending a fashion show during this year's Burning Life festival, I became very interested in the dress styles of avatars. I want to investigate about popular fashion designers in Second Life and how well their clothes are selling. Also I would investigate where people's avatars could find these designer clothes and if he/she designs clothes in real life or just for avatars in Second Life. I would also contrast this to real life styles that people are wearing today and since the economy recession, how many people are wearing name brands just in Second Life, instead of real life. I would also like to try to find out how much clothing in Second Life reflects the avatars owner's real life personality, which might be hard to find information about, but it is a fascinating question. Some people dress their avatars so scantily in Second Life, but do they dress the same in real life? I would also like to investigate how much more creativity is possible with clothing in Second Life than in real life. One outfit I saw at the Burning Life fashion show was so different and unique, but I want to know if the same outfit could be reproduced for real people to wear and how difficult it would be to make. This project will be so much fun for me to investigate, because I am a big fashionista.

To complete this project and answer my questions about fashion in Second Life I will use the following sources:

1. English, Bonnie. A Cultural History of Fashion in the Twentieth Century: from the Catwalk to the Sidewalk. New York: Oxford, 2007. Print.

-This book will provide me with more information about today's fashion industry and the difference between what clothes models wear and ones that ordinay people wear and bridging the gap between them. I will also use the book to determine if we wear clothes or they wear us. This will be a very useful reference when I want to talk about today's fashion scene in my project.

2. "Playing Fabulous Fashion :: Boudoir." Street.TV Archives. Second Life. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. <http://archive.treet.tv/fabulous-fashion-boudoir>.

-This is an interview between Angie and Vitabela Dubrovna and her sister, who design clothes in Second Life and real life, which can be used to answer my question about fashions in Second Life being transferred into real life. I can see what types of designs that have been sucessful crossing over between worlds and if the same styles are popular in Second Life and in real life.

3. Yee, Nick. "The Proteus Effect." Diss. Stanford University, 2007. The Daedalus Project. 30 June 2007. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. <http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001569.php>.

-This dissertation applies directly to my project talking about how people who are not satisfied by their real life appearence tend to improve their appearence in Second Life by having an attractive avatar. Having an attractive avatar, means clothes play a large role. I can use this source to descirbe why some avatars choose the clothes they do and how they express their personalities in Second Life.

4. La Ferla, Ruth. "No Budget, No Boundaries: It’s the Real You." The New York Times 21 Oct. 2009, E1 sec. The New York Times. 22 Oct. 2009. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Avatar.html>.

-This New York Times article talks about how people are dressing their avatars up in name brand clothes instead of themselves in real life. Since the rescession and people could not afford brand- name clothes, they decided to purchase them in Second Life for less than half the price, to make their avatars fashionable in the Second Life, like they could not be in real life. This artive could help me determine how fashions in Second Life change beacause of trouble with the economy in real life.

5. Minerd, Jeff. "High-Tech Clothes." Futurist 34.1 (2000): 3-4. Print.

-This journal article talks about what clothes could evolve into in the future, which would not be possible in Second Life. I could use to explored how clothes can be made differently in real life than in Second Life and show a limitation on fashion in Second Life. This idea might be a little extraneous to my project, but it would be intersting to try to incorporate.

These are five sources that I will use in my final project, but there is one more that I will need to find. I still need to see if I can find out how clothes are designed in Second Life. I am still on a hunt for this source.

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