If you missed last week's sampling of menswear and fashions, you can find it here.
Both of the stores we looked at this week came to us highly recommended by the discerning readers of SLI. We're still looking for places to review, so if you have a favorite men's store which has clothing, accessories, shoes, skins, hair, gadgets, or anything else you can think of, let us know. If our test audience buys something, we'll write it up the store here.
MIA (Men In Action) - Ayla Holt
Clothing(Both), Costumes(Both), Hats(Men), Accessories(Men)
The MIA (Men In Action) store is located on the MIA island Sim, along with a wealth of other stores for men's and women's clothing and assorted other items. The MIA store itself is huge, and you really need to devote some time to exploring all the sections, including some of which, while well-signed, are nonetheless tucked well away into the walls.
Aside from navigational issues, the store, as well as the clothing and accessories contained within, are of good, solid construction, with few surprises. There's formalwear, casualwear, costumes, separates - jackets, tanks, t-shirts, jeans - shoes and boots - the range covers a large span of clothing types for men, in "regular" styles. The garment construction is competent but not excellent, and displays a knowledge of what the "regular" guy in Second Life might want to wear. See the image gallery below for hand-drawn detailing and seam matching on a jacket and a pair of cargo pants; you will see that the jacket displays a miniscule amount of offset at the collar and waist where the seams join, and that the pants are sparsely detailed except at the pockets.
The island in which this store is located was quite busy while I was there, and I had some trouble keeping my client up and running. Try to visit when there are few people there, if possible.
SF Design - Swaffette Firefly
Clothing(Both), Accessories(Both), Shoes(Both), Goth, Punk, Business, Casual, Naval
Swaffette Firefly really has a wonderful sense of vision and imagination where in comes to men's clothing. She offers "regular" guy styles, with items like business suits, shirts and ties, pants, other shirt types, shoes, punk and gothic styles (see the image gallery below), and fantasy outfits. Her clothing is expertly crafted (witness her lace making, and her plaid-matching across seams), and shows a high level of detail. She uses small numbers of prims to great advantage in her designs. For "regular" folk, her business outfits are highly thought of.
1.
Look at RAC City. They have the best skins on the whole grid IMHO and I just found today that there's a men's and women's store also on that sim (just walk outside the skin shop into the square).
Posted at 7:47PM on Jul 24th 2007 by Nicholaz Beresford