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Virtual fashion and avatar design: a survey of consumers and designers

Published: 16 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

As virtual worlds evolve, so does the visual language of avatars inside them. In Second Life, an emergent virtual fashion industry supports amateur fashion/avatar design. This fashion industry includes both emergent (i.e., user-created) social institutions as well as a network of technologies, including Second Life's virtual environment itself, which support a sophisticated fusion of technical and cultural practices. This paper presents the results of a survey, offering an empirical overview of virtual fashionistas' shopping and content creation behaviors in Second Life. The results suggest relationships between technology and culture, giving rise to concrete forms of sociality, style, embodiment and gender in the virtual world. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of usability (both in fashion creation and consumption) in driving the desirability of fashion products, bodies, and even gender performances in virtual environments.

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Bardzell, J., Pace, T., Brunetti, L., Huang, Q., Perry, N., Gim, H. (2009). Emerging standards in virtual fashion: An analysis of critical strategies used in Second Life fashion blogs," Proc. HICSS-42, IEEE Computer Society, 1--10.
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Barnard, M. Fashion as Communication. Second Edition. Routledge, New York, New York, 2007.
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Barnard, M., ed. Fashion Theory: A Reader. Routledge, New York, New York, 2007.
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Crane, D. Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago University Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2000.
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Williams, D., Consalvo, M., Caplan, S., and Yee, N. Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors Among Online Gamers. Journal of Communication, 59 (2009), 700--725.
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Cited By

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  • (2023)My avatar, fashion and meDécisions Marketing10.3917/dm.109.0161N° 109:1(161-179)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Conformal, Seamless, Sustainable: Multimorphic Textile-forms as a Material-Driven Design Approach for HCIProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581156(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Toward Blockchain-based Fashion Wearables in the Metaverse: the Case of Decentraland2023 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Computing, Networking and Applications (MetaCom)10.1109/MetaCom57706.2023.00115(653-657)Online publication date: Jun-2023
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  1. Virtual fashion and avatar design: a survey of consumers and designers

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '10: Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries
    October 2010
    889 pages
    ISBN:9781605589343
    DOI:10.1145/1868914
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    • Reykjavik University
    • University of Iceland

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 16 October 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. Second Life
    2. user study
    3. user-generated content
    4. virtual fashion

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)My avatar, fashion and meDécisions Marketing10.3917/dm.109.0161N° 109:1(161-179)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
    • (2023)Conformal, Seamless, Sustainable: Multimorphic Textile-forms as a Material-Driven Design Approach for HCIProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581156(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Toward Blockchain-based Fashion Wearables in the Metaverse: the Case of Decentraland2023 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Computing, Networking and Applications (MetaCom)10.1109/MetaCom57706.2023.00115(653-657)Online publication date: Jun-2023
    • (2023)The Work Avatar Face-Off: Knowledge Worker Preferences for Realism in Meetings2023 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00112(960-969)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
    • (2020)Understanding usability evaluation setup for VR products in industryACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review10.1145/3381307.338130919:4(17-27)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2020
    • (2019)Usability evaluation of VR products in industryProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3297462(1845-1851)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
    • (2014)Fashion thinkingProceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems10.1145/2598510.2598586(1005-1014)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2014
    • (2012)Re-conceptualizing fashion in sustainable HCIProceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/2317956.2318049(621-630)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2012

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