In the past days, I’ve been making a few more attempts at creating something worth a look when it comes to clothing. So far the result doesn’t seem that bad, which is already a good point, although I know there are people out there who can craft way better clothing than I. But we all need to start somewhere, do we.

I also came back to the little project I had been working on. Even though it’s not my native culture, and I’m very aware that it’ll be more for my personal satisfaction than a really accurate representation, I wanted to give a try at Japanese-inspiration clothes. Not simply using a few patterns here and there, but real clothes, such as yukata or haori. It’s currently proving hard enough to do, especially for men’s clothing and for the whole floaty aspect of clothes, but that’s another matter, and probably it’ll go a little more smoothly once I’m more used to play with templates and patterns. Sezmra is the one who got the first (and only) sighting of my “purple yukata”, before I was locked away, but I need to rework it more for it to look fine. Perhaps even use prims in certain places, for it to look right.

Pondering these clothes made me write a little post in the artists forum recently, too. It didn’t seem to me that there were many people around doing this kind of clothing (not necessarily Asian, but “traditional costumes” from various cultures in general), so I went ahead and asked. Zana Feaver confirmed what both Sezmra and I had noticed already – doesn’t seem that anyone is really into this kind of things. Zana has worked on historical clothing though, but this seems to be the closest that could be found. Looks like if I want to see more cultural costumes, I need to work on them myself then smiles

I’m still a little surprised in any case. Surprised that, with all the diversity around in Second Life, there isn’t really any person who has designed this type of clothes. Even if only for a certain event, or locations. I’ve been wondering why, maybe it is simply that the general people base isn’t interested in this, or that it’s hard to do, or that they prefer work on different, more modern types of clothes? I know of one person who has designed priest clothes, so I assume it’s already closer to “culture”, yet it’s still not what I was looking for. It’d have been nice to be able to talk of such themes with other people, ather than design clothes in my own little corner.

We’ll see though. Because it wasn’t posted on the forums, doesn’t mean that absolutely no one has ever thought of making such clothes. Time and more exploration will tell, I guess.