A Second Life man has been left devastated after another major male shopping event closed without providing a single item of clothing that didn’t make him look like a gay French teenager from the eighties.
Dylan Mercer attended the event with what he described as “fairly modest ambitions” of finding a normal jacket. After visiting 74 stalls, he had acquired three demos, two free tattoos and a pair of trousers which appeared normal until he turned around and discovered they had no arse in them.
“I wasn’t asking for much,” he said. “Just something I could wear with jeans that didn’t have seventeen buckles, one sleeve, a harness underneath it or PARIS written across the back in 200-point type. At one point I thought I’d found a decent denim jacket, but the jacket was just the collar. Everything underneath it was sold separately and none of it was denim.”
His search for a simple T-shirt proved equally unsuccessful. “One had a neck down to my navel. One was completely transparent. One came with a little silk scarf. I tried the scarf on and immediately looked like I was about to smoke a Gauloise outside a nightclub in Nice in 1987. I only wanted something to wear while I moved a sofa.”
Mercer said the experience had been complicated by vendor photographs in which every model was bent forward, looking sideways or standing in a cloud of smoke. One jacket was advertised on a man crouching on a motorcycle beneath the word REBELLION, making it impossible to establish whether it fastened at the front.
“You can see every tendon in his neck, but you can’t see the zip,” Mercer explained. “There are nine promotional photographs. In six of them he’s having some sort of confrontation with the floor.”
Event organisers insist the latest collection represents the enormous diversity of contemporary male fashion, offering shoppers a choice between enormous, strapped, cropped, mesh, unbuttoned to the pubes, and something your mum would have worried about George Michael wearing. A spokesperson confirmed that this month’s theme was “Everyday Essentials”, which included a crystal-studded balaclava, a ceremonial chest belt and some formal jogging bottoms attached to a second, smaller pair of jogging bottoms.
“We cater to every kind of man,” she said. “Whether you’re a nightclub owner, a nightclub DJ, someone standing outside a nightclub or the enigmatic estranged son of a nightclub owner, there really is something here for everyone.”
Mercer briefly believed he had found a plain black jumper before discovering it was actually an elaborate shoulder accessory designed to be worn with leather hot pants. Another promising outfit was labelled CLASSIC GENTLEMAN, but consisted of an open waistcoat, fingerless gloves and a single rose held between the teeth.
“I just want a jumper,” he said. “A jumper with a front, a back and two sleeves. I don’t mind paying extra for the second sleeve if that’s what it takes. I’d simply like the opportunity.”
A friend suggested that he might have more luck assembling an outfit from separate purchases, prompting Mercer to spend another forty minutes establishing that the only shirt long enough to reach his trousers was incompatible with the only trousers high enough to reach his shirt. When worn together, they exposed a narrow strip of stomach which remained visible regardless of which of the product’s 46 colour options he selected.
The trousers did, however, include a HUD allowing him to change the colour of a small padlock hanging from his hip. “There are twelve metals,” he said. “Someone has sat down and made twelve different versions of a padlock for a pair of trousers that don’t have pockets.”
His final attempt involved a coat advertised as TIMELESS, which came with an integrated bare chest, three necklaces and a compulsory cigarette. Removing the cigarette also removed his left hand.
At press time, Mercer had returned to the outfit he bought in 2022. It remains the only thing he owns that doesn’t make him look like he’s about to seduce a synth player from Duran Duran.
He has since contacted its creator to ask whether they might consider making another one. They said they would, but only if there was sufficient demand. Meanwhile, the event’s elbow corset had sold 4,000 copies.