de.stijl

Posted by Alpha Auer

Why this?

I wished to make something starkly, absurdly geometric and see whether it could in fact result in a garment – one that people would actually wear, that is…

I was thus hugely gratified when, not so long ago, fellow Turk and SL associate Troy Vogel contacted me and told me what a traffic stopping, knock em dead success he had been wearing this outfit (down to those lovely little prim shoes) to the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright museum in SL. And a more appropriate place to be flaunting this I really cannot think of…

The thing with the big tenets of modernist design, such as “less is more”, “form follows function” and “ornament is crime” is to know exactly how far to take them before the whole thing erupts in sublime ridiculousness, and somewhat more seriously in a relinquishment of personal identity, given that (when it comes to appearance) it is our very ornaments that distinguish us from the one standing next to us. Sometimes intentionally so, but more often than not quite unawares: You wear suede cowboy boots, I wear Doc Maarten’s – both are in their essence ornamental objects that reveal who we are, what we like, and quite a bit more as well. The purely functional boot, entirely devoid of the crime of ornament? Hmmm… Kinda hard to imagine really, no? And, I for one, have to be very careful to remember all this since my natural tendencies in design do in fact lean towards the stark, the unadorned, the less rather than the more… So, I do fall in love when I see something like Rietveld’s Schroder House and my little old graphic designer’s heart does go pit-a-pat gazing at his famous white chair.

Stark as it may be, the de.stijl dress is (in the end), all about ornament – and quite deliberately so at that. In fact, it is ornamental to the point where I quite enjoy imagining Theo van Doesburg clobbering me on the head with one of his arithmetic compositions as a punishment for it (not that he is still around to do so, alas…).

Ornament as evidenced in the spine cubes: They certainly serve no function, other than to make your life utterly miserable should you wish to lean back into your – oh so gorgeously comfortless – red, blue, yellow and black reclining chair. (Oh and, just before I forget – I did throw a couch along the same lines into the sales box of this. With embedded poseball of course! A nice small cube: Right where your derriere is supposed to go. Verrrry functional that!…). Or the prim train: Try getting into a crowded space with that! (I wonder how Troy managed it? Can’t have been much of a turnout at the event, I suppose). Or the mohawk? What would you need to put that on, I wonder? Screws? And last but not least is of course the prim manicure! Try nibbling at your hors d’oeuvres with that!

So, it is me taking the piss out of my own obsessions. This de.stijl dress. For men and women, I should add…

…

Note: Following the worthy adage of less is more, this is probably the most decolté outfit alpha.tribe has ever put out there. In fact, so risque is it that I got bashful and did not pose for it in any of the images but had Amina do it instead. I mean, when all is said and done, I am a look-alike avatar and it would not do at all, you know!?!

…

de.stijl is available for 300L$ here at alpha.tribe at Klein.

…

Splitsky

Posted by Alpho Fullstop

It is not a great image, but I think it will give a fairly good idea as to where Splitsky came from in the first place.

Unlike Jules Verne, which has never sold very much at all, Splitsky has been and still is very popular amongst all the stuff that we sell. Possibly a dead ringer to things like Daegu, Padded and the Rousseau skins even…

Although our human’s horrifyingly ill behaved cat Hopik is the primary source of inspiration for a skin (or rather a face) that is split right down the middle; much else that went into Splitsky came about out of necessity in that the avatar templates of SL give you only one arm! And it was this circumstance, which made the creation of one black and one white arm completely impossible, that led to the huge sea urchin attachment which conceals the underlying black arm on the white side of the skin.

And why sea urchin? It is basically a hundred fold repeated version of the cheek texture of the rabbit head. The initial idea was to have huge dots on the arm as well. Looked dreadful, so they ended up getting smaller and smaller until I had the sea urchin. And this arm, in its turn, lead to the creation of a side plate since the invisibility prims that I had to use ended up cutting up the torso of the avatar when looked at from the side.

This in its turn lead to a belt/skirt with huge hoops, matching hind paws and then (God only knows why – I have absolutely no idea where this last one came from!) a planetarium which actually revolves around a central sun and gets attached to one of the pectorals of the avatar.

Splitsky is possibly the first (and to date only) outfit where we had to let coincidences, largely bred out of necessity, rule the design process. There was an initial idea and I did manage to implement it but with many changes and adjustments along the way. Thus, it can be said that here I really did prove my mettle as an SL avatar designer – one who knows how to work within (and surpass) the constrictions of the medium. ;-)

…

Splitsky, which incidentally is unisex – the male version being identical to the female version shown in this post, is available for 250L$ here at alpha.tribe at Klein.

…

Jules Verne

Posted by Alpho Fullstop

I think Jules Verne is our human’s one big favorite of all the things we made so far. And not only my own but the entire alpha.tribe output I might add… It is thus funny that much as we like it very few have ever been sold?

…

The idea for designing a unisex historic diver’s suit came from two things: One was the fact that around this time Alpha was busy designing a contemporary diving suit for our Klein neighbors, the S+R operation of SL (suit shown above during an outing with wolfgeng Hienrichs to Blake Sea, Siren’s Isle). This also lead her to make male and female neko diving suits for Syncretia (the image on this post below was taken at the no longer existent Poetik Velvets sim and not Syncretia…).

The other thing was an Arcadia Asylum package containing a historic diver’s helmet and oxygen tank that Amina stumbled upon just while Alpha was busy with all the S+R gear. While the original prims were in no way suitable to be utilized as they were (the helmet was big enough to sit inside it – almost. Slight exaggeration but it really was huge, massive in fact!) they did inspire me to make new attachments based upon the idea, namely a new helmet  – however a neko one complete with ears. Much the same also applies to Arcadia Asylum’s historic oxygen tank which I also re-built with completely different proportions regarding height and width since the original did not really fit the average avatar, being far too wide and then too short. And from that came the suit decorated with a historic phoenix pattern in black and gold as well as the black phoenix fins and so I arrived at Jules Verne… Which has really not been hugely popular with our customers I am very much afraid…

:-)

…

Jules Verne is available at a very reasonable price tag of 175L$ here at alpha.tribe at Klein.

Redouté

Posted by Xiamara Ugajin

Redouté’s famous botanical illustration Rosa Indica is what this outfit is all about. And this is one of the very few (2 out of 8 in fact) things which I have made that is female only. In hindsight I can see how there could conceivably also be a male counterpart to this outfit, however not as it is, not with the long flowy skirt. And quite frankly, I would hate to loose this skirt – the textures match the avatar cloth quite well and it took me ages to get it to that point. :-)

The outfit comes with two skins, one of which is quite wild in that the roses cover the eyes and lips, creating a rather scary feel. The other skin is far more flattering and so I have thrown that in for more conservative users. However, for me the real skin is the wild one – that is the one that I would wear for sure. Beautiful as flowers may be, I do not see them as these soft, decorative, hapless beings. What interests me in flora is very much the dark side…

There is a black and a white version to the garment, which comes with arm attached rose particle emitters (something I do not see being used all too often in SL couture – I wonder why? They are, after all, so very easy to adapt to garments and add so much to them), a mohawk, skirts, sculpty pumps and sheer stockings.

…

Redouté is available for 250L$ right here.

La Belle Epoque

Posted by Xiamara Ugajin

At some point quite early on, maybe into the 4th or 5th avatar which we had created, we realized as a collective body that we would wherever and whenever possible create apparel and outfits that were for both men and women. And not only that, we also felt that it would be a very good thing if the male version and the female version of the outfits were as close to one another as they could possibly be. In other words, what we were shooting for then (and even more so today!) was/is an androgynous appearance/feeling if not indeed identity. Thus the male version of La Belle Epoque is almost identical to the female version – bar the hair and the skirt, in place of which men get a somewhat less elaborate mohawk and a belt. The spikes on the hips they share…

One of the obvious resources to turn to within the context of androgyny is the history of costumes and clothes. Grapho has already said here that the genderization of clothes is a modernist manifestation which can roughly be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment. We are not specialists in this area, so this is really nothing but an amateurish observation which would probably raise the hackles of a costume historian. However, when we look at the attire of the Elizabethans or Renaissance clothing or indeed the historic clothing of our own culture it does seem like as if differences were far less pronounced than they have been over the past two centuries. Henry VIII seems to have worn as much lace as his daughter. And taking things even further, Ottoman men and women wore the exact identical caftans up until the 19th century!

This said, the historic references on this outfit are from a staunchly modernist era, Art Nouveau or rather the Secession. These are mapped onto both the garment (a strange sort of leotard) as well as the skin of the avatar as 3D embossings. So, there on the skin, we already have another reference, which is tribal scarification, as a result of which the skin gets “embossed” through the scar.

The main idea behind this outfit however, was to combine biological shape, particularly spikes from both flora and fauna – cacti, agave and from animals such as porcupines, since Art Nouveau design itself is based on an adaptation of natural form to man made constructs. In the case of Art Nouveau the result is often soft, almost amorphous and I tried to retain that in the fin du siècle ornamentation that I used – however combined with something which, for me, is as natural as the softest of soft petals and leaves: The defense mechanisms which we all project outwards from our bodies…

…

Special thanks go to Truthseeker Young who gave us an absolutely wonderful belt which he had made out of toruses (yep! no sculpties, although he is a dab hand at that as well of course!) and which I used here, re-textured to fit the rest. But but but… So gorgeous is this belt that a lot of the rest of the prim work has been based around it.

…

La Belle Epoque costs 250L$ and is available here.

Copper Celt

Posted by Grapho Fullstop

Hot on the heels of Padded came Copper Celt. This time the historic references are not only implied but very tangibly there in the shape of Celtic ornaments which are used both in the avatar clothing as well as all of the attachments – of which there are almost too many to count. The basis for almost all of these prims is a full permission historic armor which I purchased on XStreetSL. (All the tribe has been doing a lot of this and quite frankly we see no reason not to do so, especially when it comes to sculpty prims. While creating the prims is of course important it is really their integration into the design system and the ensuing texturing that makes an outfit come to life. And also, to make an RL analogy: When you tailor garments in RL do you also weave the fabric? Nope… Usually not… Buying full permission objects to use for resale in SL is thus quite similar – not to mention the fact that doing so serves metanomics, makes the whole system turn.)

Back to Copper Celt: The idea for this came from a t-shirt our human has which is studded with Celtic knots. The t-shirt is black as are the ornaments on it. What differentiates the knots from the background is the actual texture of the material – the knots are a sort of a fuzzy-rubbery affair and the background is just regular t-shirt material. Anyway, based upon this thing, the virtual garment was to be named Black Celt and I simulated the black on black appearance of the t-shirt almost exactly through hours of work in photoshop. However when I put the garment on in-world I realized that what I had ended up with was just very glum and drab looking. Again – the joys of working with avatar cloth and how it absolutely refuses to do what you want it to do! Ever! So, it was back to the drawing board and I colorized almost all the knots on the garment to a copper hue and thus the outfit was renamed to Copper Celt. All the prim textures were created after this. Having been hard at work rezzing avatar apparel related stuff for the past few months, I was at a point where I had already sussed that it is asinine to even think about prim textures before you have the garment’s textures in place – so much will depend on them in the end.

Alpha has a huge weakness for shine in her building work. In a world devoid of shadows (no matter that we can see them with the Kirsten viewer, they really do not look too good, do they?), she finds that shine adds a great deal of volume to her constructs. So, following her recipe, I added shine and also glow to the prims – something I do not see done too often in SL clothing. Admittedly, when it comes to apparel design, shine will probably not work most of the time and indeed CC is one of the very few garments where we have gone for this solution. The armor based nature of the outfit seemed to justify the usage of an element which would render the perception of it as something deserving a good polish every then and again. Similarly glow seems to greatly enhance prim work – however it needs to be handled with great caution I think. Use too much of it, and before you even know it, you have a glow mess on your hands. Here it is used on very small prims which are scattered around the armor and which are meant to serve as jewels.

The ponpons which I first used in Padded are here in great abundance as well. I construct these out of a hair texture which I map onto a tapered cylinder and then flexify them so that they move with the avatar, similar to hair. Not visible in these images but clearly visible in the huge image which you can access by clicking on the upper image of this post, is a quiver full of arrows worn on the back, which again came with the full permission armor and which I had a great time texturing. The sword on the other hand, which I also had a really good time with, is visible on the images above.

…

Copper Celt is available at alpha.tribe for 250L$. Teleport directly from here.