black and white

Originally uploaded by al-zahra

i was silly and posted this on the show your style thread.


black and white stats:
by gauze (formerly illuminati):
akemi (white)
amaya (black)
myaku stomps (white)
illuminati eclipse boots (black)

nightshade designs: dark jester skin
hair: magika geisha black and white a
naughty cat: goth hat
aDiva: hair ruffle from temptress set
GField: Lady Rose Hairpin (wine)

sexy-land hitman pranker

i can't help it. i just like to prank people. there is just something so infinitely amusing about it. i was dressed as la virgen de los sicarios, and after wandering in midian city for a while, realizing I looked too much like I belonged there, i decided it might be more fun to go somewhere totally unexpected.

i ended up at a place i'd already been, a naughty voyeur motel in SL. i don't cyber, and i think the notion of "sex" in SL is pretty silly (a personal opinion)...and i had been there before to laugh and take a machinima of juana dancing in the peepshow and mostly to gawk at the set up.

i was not disappointed in terms of the silliness factor. there were people wandering about in various states of undress, and after trying out the poses (alone) and screaming with laughter at the simulated avatar sex faces, I went to pose in the peepshow room. to my great amusement someone arrived to watch me though i was only using a bellydance animation. he seemed insensitive to my obvious surprise and joking because i kept asking him if he was serious, how could such an improbable display be so interesting?

i got bored and left the wildly upholstered peepshow room because he horrified me with his susequent chafing of the bish.

as I fled i didn't realize there was an upper level to this build, and so i ascended to investigate. in SL everyone is a peeping tom anyway, with your camera being able to cross walls. and i spied a guy waiting on a bed in one of the rooms.

so i did what came naturally, which is to say i busted in on him with guns drawn pretending to be a hitman.

i forgot in my innocence that this might be construed as a sort of game. i think this what the poor befuddled gentleman thought. he was sending me politely worded yet insistent IMs offering various services. i just laughed and laughed. The whole scene was made even more risible by the sudden arrival of an audience. they were drawn i suppose by the lure of two green dots together on the mini map.
avatars have a very vacant slack jawed look to them that seemed quite appopriate given the circumstances.

i did get bored though and announced to the assembly that i was not there for games, booty, and fun, just playing a prank. and walked back into the downstairs.

the downstairs is incidentally furnished with a naughty cinema. i didn't bother to activate the screen. i was wandering around liking the way the red interior looked with my outfit when several people arrived and sat down in the seats. for the most part they were clothed. but one person felt very moved to remove his clothes in my presence. he had a hilariously impossibly large appendage too. he worked it up and down a few times presumably to get my attention.

i ignored him. and he sat down beside me, with his avatar periodically breaking into an idiotic grin. for some reason he also felt that decorum would be violated if he removed his shoes, and so they stayed on.

i finally became bored and left, presumably never to return. :)

ay POPI

i thought it would be funny to go somewhere where my dress didn't match the surroundings. first off i went to some trashy "666" horror sim in my beloved new POPI dress by Eshi Otawara.

so far so good right? no. i was wandering around looking impossibly pert and perky in the stereotypically gloomy satanic lite lame ass sim (with two big ass pistols i may add) and clicked on some sort of animated scene type things.
some were merely incomprehensible, mostly they were silly.

but then again, how i can i say they are silly if i myself am there too?

it's only cuz i am being ironic. (yeah right)

while on my little tour of the premises, i got trapped in a spider cage thingy. i didn't mind though, because this is sort of what i think a deranged fashionista would look like, after having to keep up with everyone for so long.

but we can chalk this up to hallucinations and exhaustion right? which means a stint in rehab or a hospital.....................................

so i looked around for lunatic asylums. this one appears to be a clubhouse for a group of people who like to put mildly pronish pics of their avatars all over the place. i decided to stay because the bear at this lunatic asylum reminds me of tedi........

the crazy wannabe fashionista is clad in:

POPI by Eshi Otawara
Skin Ultralight Vamp red (Nomine)
Pearls (i can't remember)
GField Lady Rose Shoes in Pale Pink
Katonka hair by Catwa

shopping binge

i am always the last person in the world to find out things.

i found a sl visual kei fashion blog i loved, and zeroed into a store i hadn't been to yet. and pretty much went crazy in there. then i took myself to club baby seals and saw dancien and momo. momo was wearing the dogwitch set from nomine. i didn't recognize what dancien wore save the burnt bones skin from Nomine. it was funny because momo naturally knew all about the store i had visited, and even chided me very gently, with her astounding encyclopedic knowledge of sl fashion. i also had no idea either about the hair boycott, and got a rundown on it. it was a really interesting hour or so visit--i tried out my new computer, and dancien and momo talked a little about the things they did when they make their poems in the language of images. it was really fascinating to hear, like having the curtain drawn back and seeing the gears moving behind the scenes.

stats:

skin: dark jester; latex top, skirt, leg bands: isis silks; boots: black widow; all by Nightshade Designs
skulls chest ornament, gloves, stockings, and underpants: Dogwitch by Nomine
tattoos: Mayan Dream by Garden of Ku
bracelets: Bloody rawbones by Retox
skull nose ring: AVZ
Jolly roger armband: Grim Bros
hair: Riddle by Magika
wings: Cobweb by Material Squirrel
badass obsidian sword: Cortech cyber Macahuitl by Beezle Warburton

it was interesting, and i left soon after. i wanted to try on the rest of the things i had bought, and bored, went to odaesan house. i tried on one of the dresses i had found, a black EGL, and to amuse myself listened to malice mizer's song "baroque" while i wandered around. i am curious if since it is all black, that means it qualifies as a kuro loli dress?

stats:

skin: dark jester; dress, stockings, gloves: Sade; leg bands: isis silks; boots: black widow; by Nightshade Designs
tattoos: Mayan Dream by Garden of Ku
parasol: Reien set by Sweetaholic
skull nose ring: AVZ
Immaculate heart necklace: Tekel'li
hair: Lucy by Magika
Skull Ear Spikes: Mad About
Raven Pennyfeather hat: Nonna Hedges

i got some more dresses and boots but i will have to wait for another day to fiddle with them.

sxsw part two (interesting bands and their outfits)

Originally uploaded by al-zahra

it's a pity i didn't get more funny pictures, but it's hard to sneak up on people and take pictures with the phone when you are doubled over laughing. i mean, i just can't stop myself from laughing. it was bad enough with troy because we'd look at each other and make faces. i did however get this one pic of jrockers outside elysium. it was a pain in the ass to try to stand behind them, because their hair blocked the view of everything. i have absolutely no idea who they are or if they are famous.

these are few crackberry pics of the bands that i saw. they ranged from the pretty charming and aggressively stylish to the insane.

the japanese show is a useful starting point, because the (admittedly few) bands i saw there were interestingly dressed, as were the spectators. pictured to the left is the band "the emeralds" who wore leather pants and jackets with polyester shirts. they also wore big ugly plastic sunglasses, as part of a pseudo elvis tribute.

the fans wore a wide range of things, with minis, legwarmers, etc. it was very much like second life becoming real life.....people were wearing whatever, like anime characters or covered in tatts and piercings.

the band "mad juana" was very interesting. this is the violin player. the rest of the band wore an intriguing meld of roma, spanish, mexican, and hipster outfits. this guy scared the freaking hell out of me because i bumped into him in the hallway not noticing and i just wasn't expecting to meet death so soon. he was also wearing halloween spectacles that distorted his eyes in addition to the heavy make up and improbable combo of mariachi suit and afghan hat. i liked the black polka dot skirt-velvet corset plus piano shawl and tophat that the accordion player wore, and the lead singer looked like the greaser girlfriend in the movie grease--with plaid capris, a satin 50s letter jacket, and a rose in her hair.

the most austerely stylish were the moog, from budapest. they had us laughing because they were so into their style and appearance that the band members would duck into the bathroom at least every 15 minutes to make sure their hair was utterly perfect. the lead guy especially was very chichi, with uber tight black jeans, pointy toed shoes, red shirt, vest and jacket and ascot.
it was hard not to stare at him when he was off stage because he was just so easy on the eyes.

======================================================================

honorable mention: monareta


they are zany, but it takes balls to wear a silver helmet with a bicycle wheel mounted on top of it. that and dancing energetically around, and climbing balconies........i mean it's not really an outfit, but i thought it was hilarious.

i also saw a band of street performers, half furry, who were a type of brass band with trombones and things. they weren't entirely furry, only partly, but wore bits and pieces of marching band uniforms....the one human was dressed sort of like a sweet little country rodeo clown.........

reien kimono confusion

Originally uploaded by al-zahra

at the Sweetaholic sim, in their back garden, listening to Shiina Ringo by Anna Tsuchiya.

i love sweetaholic kimonos, it is a terrible obsession. they are gorgeous and i love the blend of modern and gothic elements with traditional ones. that being said, i think that the way juana is wearing this outfit, is grammatically improper in kimono-ese. for one thing, the very low nape of the neck, and the three toed geta with no socks, scream oiran, though the obi is tied in the back like a geisha's and the hair is pretty restrained like a geisha's too. its funny because i had to modify the obi to fit juana. she is very short for an avatar, and so fitting obis for her is a particularly odious chore. it started off with the obi scarf pretty high up, which would indicate youth, but because juana has such a short torso, to make it fit her an i had to push the obi scarf so down that it is nearly invisible, which means juana is wearing her obi more like a very very old woman would.

i am sure the kimono police will show up and beat her up for her kimono insolence, and for all the other terrible crimes against kimono that she is committing.

stats:
kimono, obi, neck adornment, geta, fan and parasol Reien set by Sweetaholic
geisha hair black a by Magika
Mourna skin black by Nomine

urban tribes

Originally uploaded by al-zahra, who appears to be from the pseudo hipster tribe

the language of clothes is a way to encode all sorts of things...one of the most fascinating things to me is to "read" people in a crowd, to learn about them and understand them in the context of the world by the things that they are announcing and saying about themselves in their dress.

sxsw has been fun to stare at all the urban tribes, because the streets are literally thronged with all nationalities, ages, conditions....all the different little groups we belong to, because we believe or we want to be a certain style or way of living.....

i often feel that as i get older i am losing my handle for the language of the urban tribes, that perhaps i can't get the finer nuances of why tight jeans plus pointy toed shoes and glasses=hipster and whatnot. i never really felt an allegiance to a tribe, other than the weirdo-american community, and so tend to freely mix things up. i wonder though what it is that these little whims translate to, what i am really telling people with the way i dress.

right now i am totally in love with miniskirt plus leggings plus goofy tshirt plus chucks. but i saw very few people wearing this combo. instead there were tons of women wearing miniskirts and boots. it being texas, naturally the cowboy boot predominated, but the 80s-ish slouch boots and those weird flat heeled boots were very much in evidence.

i didn't go to any goth, punk, or major subculture bars so i didn't get any firsthand observations on those tribes. i think one of the funniest things about the bleed through of SL into RL is the skewed perspective on fashion. maybe it is just me but it seems that because i am used to seeing the most bizarre things on an avatar, that i have come to regard that as normal even for RL....which can be funny.

i notice too, in my limited forays into sl fashion, that there seem to be tribes in SL. maybe they mirror the urban tribes i see in the real world. it seems to me that there is a group of sl fashion types who seek to replicate real life fashion very closely, and those that seem to embrace the unrealistic possibilities of SL.

i was too much into everything to take major notes but i also tend to really scrutinize the noticeably foreign because they always seem to be the ones who are wearing the freshest styles..........

sugar skull catrina, remixed

in hangars liquides...........

music is dj tiesto's remix of binary finary's 1998.

Originally uploaded by al-zahra

the theme of this ensemble is la catrina, the other manifestation of mictlancacihuatl...who is famous as a symbol of the day of the dead. i wore a version of this outfit for my dia de los muertos party, but i unearthed it again after getting a fabulous skin from munchflower zaius of nomine. it was an unexpected gift, and i literally wanted (and still want to) thank her every day because it is an amazingly detailed beautiful skin, with a sugar skull face.

i love this dress anyway--there is something so off-kilter but beautiful about it, and i love how it exposes one side of the body. originally i wore a custom version of nomine's burnt bones skin, and the "to live and die" tattoo set, so the visible parts had visible bones. but with this new skin, i wore the "mayan dream" tattoos by garden of ku, because the placement of those tats is very complimentary to the gown. and that hat--it amazes me how it goes so well with the gown.


OMG hilarious--it's a look that goes from streetwalker to amateur sniper, too.

skin: Sylvan Sugar Skull by Nomine (a gift from Munch)<3 <3
hair: KatKota hair by Catwa
hat: Eliza's Ascot hat by Illusions Dress: White Shadow by Sweetest Goodbye
Kashu boa and Mei panties by Dirty Lynx
Hair rose, lace gloves, rose ring, and ruffle by G Field
Ouka Saki collar by Illuminati Ring: Yoru lingo by Nonko
Bax Ankle boots by Max Coen
Upper arm belt by Sweetaholic
Wilted Wednesday vest by Kyoot Army OnePiece64 Stockings by Kuri Style Tattoos: Mayan Dream by Garden of Ku

life in death (catch up) or zombie sabbath bride

Originally uploaded by al-zahra

i am lazy and never keep up. and so i often retro-post, when i have the leisure and inclination. and this is one egregious example. (i am writing this in march)

this is an old outfit, that i wore actually several places. one was zorena's halloween party, which would make this my "official" halloween outfit.

i also wore it on an evening visiting, in the whispering city of hangar liquides, where i saw angels walking, and was under the spell of wings of desire.........

this is one i chose pretty carefully, and i meant it to speak for me. the tophat and skin are a pretty clear reference to baron samedi, the profane and oh so aztec (though not) voudoun god, who has that particular blend of death and fecundity. the snake bracelets too, reference voudoun but also they are a symbol of rebirth. the necklace is an exact version of the kabbalistic tree of life. if i remember correctly i wore this on a friday, which was amusing.

and that is where my symbolism ends really.

the zombie sabbath bride wears:
voodoo skin by Deviant Kitties
tophat by Illusions
Tree of Life, Medusa armlets, Cenobite's Claws by Tekel'li
Remains of the Night dress by Ookami Ningen
Checkered stockings by Amplify
Harajuku stomps boots by Dark Eden
Kristin hair by Zero Style

cihuateotl

cihuateotl: in aztec belief, the souls of women who died in childbirth accompanied the souls of dead warriors and followed the sun as it journeyed across the sky. they also became hummingbirds, after a certain period of time.
i am mildly obsessed with mesoamerican culture. there are lots of little survivals of it in the present day here and there--for example while pregnant my mother called me in a panic because there would be a lunar eclipse and she begged me to tie a bunch of keys to my waist to protect the child.

and i have quite a fixation on the the cihuateteo. it's a personal reason mostly--i had a post partum hemorrhage and almost died when my daughter was born.
so i like to think that if i had died i would have been a hummingbird, or perhaps even now escorting the souls of the dead soldiers who died in iraq.......but i digress.

this is one thing about second life--you can be whatever you want, and encode however many layers of meaning you wish, in the choices of the clothes you wear. and so the whole cihuateotl thing is one fashion tic i keep i coming back to over and over.

grady honored me much by photographing me dressed as a cihuateotl in a strange citizens post on strange pixels. for that one i wore the outfit on the right, which was sort of showgirlish. indeed, i wore a feather headdress and tailfeathers from a showgirl outfit, along with an aztec styled crown, loincloth and top from the Oshun set (more on that later) and Eris boots by Dark Eden, tinted ghungroo (ankle bells, like what yaqui deer dancers wear) by Zaara, and skull choker and earspikes by Mad about. I wore the Lost Gloom Stalker skin that i adore.

i have since worn several versions of the cihuateotl outfit. the elements though are the same:

• To Live and To Die Dia de los Muertos themed tats, which are brilliant, and my personal faves or the Mayan Dream tats by Garden of Ku
  
• the burnt bones skin by nomine, though later i was able to get a custom modification of that skin so that the face was less skull-like, with black lipstick
• Skull nose ring by AVZ
• Cenobite bracers by Tekel'li
  
• a hummingbird emitter, which i thought was so brilliant and cool
  
• Cortech Macahuitl and dagger, in obsidian and cyber versions. (by the freaking brilliant Beezle Warburton)
• sometimes i wear a cyberheart, which would have replaced the one i lost via sacrifice. [B] the Heart
• Needful Things Death Raven skirt

There are tons more of things that i have worn in my capacity of cihuateotl, but i suppose i will list them separately....................................

Uncredited items of clothing:
hair: Chill by AVZ, Anabel by Deviant Kitties
mekahooves and cellular pants by AVZ
Vampire trick pants and goth boots by Susie
Camisole from the Gamine girl set
Fishnet shirt from .....
Leeloo noir shirt from Nocturnal threads

all that we percieve.........

i was in the jewelled garden, and feeling pretty sad and lonely. and so while i was listening to my fave thievery corporation song, i decided to record my outfit.....

the sad gynoid wears:
skin: Whispers of Night Deathly F Lost Gloom Stalker
Gynoid eyes and body attachments: Servo Unit by Stygian Avatars
hair: Azaria by C + C
nose piercing: AVZ Skull Nose Piercing
jacket, skirt, pants, jacket, gloves : Brood outfit (cut) by KC Fashions
boots: Armidi Gisaci Kyoto Boot Black/Black
badass obsidian dagger & sheath: Cortech Cyber Dagger 3.0
pose: Body Language by SLC Haruka Modeling Poses set.

i am listening to "all that we percieve" by thievery corporation......

gynoid

I was still feeling the gynoid vibe and so i went to insilico, because it is sort of blue and very cyberpunk. in fact it reminds me much of Ghost in the Shell.

i got lost and managed to find myself in some forgotten corner. in my present state of undress i felt it prudent to be somewhat reclusive, and stumbled upon this strange room. it seemed the perfect accessory.

for i see now that the surroundings are important, to accentuate and harmonize with one's attire........

the gynoid wears:

skin: Whispers of Night Deathly F Lost Gloom Stalker
Gynoid eyes, gloves, and body attachments: Servo-Unit by Stygian Avatars
hair: Riddle by Magika
nose piercing: AVZ Skull Nose Piercing
boots: from the Heroine set by Slick
pose: Body Language by SLC Haruka Modeling Poses set.