It is a (not so) funny coincidence that a new debate about body size issues in SL started just when the topic had already occupied me over the last few days: I found myself too thin in the Blogger Appreciation Week picture, but blamed it on the perspective, until I saw another picture of myself and again looked skinnier than I wanted to be. So I turned up body thickness by ten points (I prefer this over the body fat slider, because the latter also alters the facial shapes, which I didn’t want in this case) and increased the value determining the size of my belly. And then I’d probably have forgotten about the problem if not discussions about a designer’s requirements for model shapes had appeared on the feeds. (I won’t name the designer on purpose, since this isn’t about personal criticism, but rather about why I chose to look the way I do.)
While I believe everyone has the right to look just the way they want to, I still can have an opinion about it. All of this wouldn’t bother me as much if not the claim had been made that the shape was supposed to represent RL supermodels, when in fact the average fashion bloggers’ shapes already do represent RL model proportions or even exceed them. I am in no way extreme in SL: neither especially tall nor small, neither extremely thin nor big; my legs might actually be shorter than the average female avatar’s. Yet, I had to realize yesterday, when comparing my regular shape to one meeting the designer’s requirements, that my ordinary shape already was out of proportion if measuring it against realistic figures.
The average human being’s proportion means that the overall height measures about 7.5 heads – or, in other words, an average real-life person’s body height is 7.5 times the height of their head. In art, a particularly graceful figure was painted or sculpted at an idealized proportion of 8 heads, and muscly “superheroes” and Greek gods could measure up to 8.5 heads. My own size in SL, however, already was at 8.5 heads, and with that beyond what RL supermodels look like, not to mention realistic average women. The fault, in my case, were too long legs, and I scaled them down from a slider value of 52 to 50. I also took the overall height from 58 to 55, so that now I more or less represent what is seen as the ideal human shape. If measured against a prim stretched to the same size, my avatar would be about 184 cm or 6 ft tall (without shoes or hair), with a leg length of 112.7 cm or 3.7 ft. In other words: now that I’m smaller than ever before in SL, I have what corresponds to supermodel proportions.
Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. It’s none of my business if some designer wants to see their brand represented by what looks to me grotesquely-shaped avatars. Still, in my opinion it is sad that in a virtual world where we all could rise above the restrictions of RL, even more unrealistic standards are being reinforced by some. And with the growing number of prim parts being used in fashion, it is only a question of time until you either have to succumb to a designer’s vision of proportions, have to mod most things you buy (I already had some examples where my avatar was too big for the included prim parts), or just not buy certain brands anymore.
If I didn’t do so much “period hopping” in regards to fashion and if the beauty ideals of these periods didn’t differ so vastly, I’d probably have settled on a plumper shape early on. But during the 1930s and most of the 1940s, a very lean silhouette was en vogue, while the 1950s favoured more curves. The 1920s, on the other hand, were more interested in androgynous shapes. IÂ wanted to have an avatar who could have passed as fashionable in each of these times rather than creating a separate shape for each decade, so I had to go for something not too extreme. But sometimes I really want to make her heavier, just as a little visual counterbalance…
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Vintage Verwood 