Rouge Darcy

Rouge Darcy, designer for Rebel Xtravaganza first rezzed in Second Life a 'year and a few days' ago. For her RL credentials, she only wishes to share some small hints: 'B.B. that's all you get to know ;)' and 'A lady never tells of course...'. So we're looking for a female B.B, that is - ah, more details - a RL foreign languages student and works as a freelancer in the graphics & web design field. Which also contains being skilled in photography and able to do illustration work. Any body you know, maybe? ;)

But enough about her Real Life, let's talk about Rouge Darcy's Second Life and what drove her to it. At the beginning of 2007, Rouge checked the secondlife.com homepage and wasn't much impressed. Then some months later, in August to be precise, her dear friend Alia Baroque, while partying after a concert half drunk (both of them actually) told her something along the lines of "hey, they have BDSM too", Rouge's drunken answer must have been something like "wow, I have to sign up" and the day after she became Rouge Darcy. After she recovered her confirmation email from the spam folder (process that took her almost three full days), she sadly realized that the grid was down and so it remained for days and days until she gave up with a shrug, thinking that she would have tried later. Almost half a month passed until Rouge decided to try again, August became September and Rouge finally managed to get into this big social experiment called Second Life. A few months later she also discovered that her patience had been rewarded with a shiny rubber duck conveniently situated in her library. As up to day, Rouge Darcy stays loyal to Second Life - maybe because of her love for the shiny rubber duck? - and does not frequent any other virtual worlds.

Rouge's first experience with fashion in SL, mainly dealt with fiddling with what was in her library folder. Her first incarnation was a cyber girl, with pink system hair and an alpha gate texture applied to them; she thought she looked wonderful until the crazy laugh of her friend Alia, suggested her that maybe she wasn't as gorgeous as she thought. A bit scorned, she then had been led to fetch some so called freebies and given a proper skin (by REALSKIN, still in her inventory and still cherished) which luckily was transfer and she suddenly felt better, but that, of course, wasn't enough. She soon realized she needed more... after reminding herself that she could draw, she frantically run to look for a template. The process took five minutes, and finally she was there... with her Photoshop open muttering unrepeatable words on how much the template... well... sucked. Different people, when interviewed, claimed to have heard her saying "@*#! if I only could paint on the 3d model itself, @*#!@*#! or at least not on a stretched figure @*#!@*#!@*#!"... those words are not confirmed though.

After a lot of trial and error, tutorial watching (which helped her only in figuring out how to cut prims), fighting with seams and swearing (a lot of swearing), Rouge made her first creations: a pair of eyes, some tops and a couple of prim skirts which she handed to her friends...it was the beginning of October by then.

In December, Rouge felt she was good enough to start selling her items; and she felt right! For the creation process of her virtual designs, Miss Darcy uses - amongst others - Photoshop, Illustrator and 3D Studio Max for the sculptie parts. Rouge doesn't really have a preference for any time period in particular even though victorian, gothic and baroque fascinate her the most. Tim Burton, Takashi Miike, manga/anime in general and her own weird dreams are a big inspiration for her... she still doesn't know if they inspire her items also... she'll ask though :) Rouge Darcy's target audience? Anyone who doesn't take things too seriously... seriously.

More on Rouge Darcy and Rebel Xtravaganza at rebelxtravaganza.blogspot.com.