Hugo’s Designs

Some of the top latex designers back in the system avatar era, like Kai Heideman and his Powers of Creation shop, closed down in the mesh era. Now in the BOM era, Kai is reselling his products as BOM latex.

Other latex designers, like Jackie Graves and Erik Hugo have made the transition to mesh. Depending on your past experience — I think a lot of SL system and prim fashion designers were not previously 3D modelers — without experience with Blender or Maya, Texturing, Rigging, and that entire process — it could take months, or a year of serious effort to get up to speed on everything. The quality of mesh is indisputable, but it’s raised the barrier to entry and thinned out the pool of designers who are able/willing to create it.

When I said to Erik that if you developed good 3D skills for making SL clothing, you might be able to turn them into a PW career, he replied “I wish!” He informed me that in fact Peter Jackson has not called and asked him to come on down and help out at Weta Digital.

It seems like both Erik and Jackie Graves, while continuing to produce gorgeous new mesh fetishwear, have slowed down their once frenetic pace of SL fashion releases. Perhaps because of the complexity of the work, perhaps because of commitments in the PW. Erik says his PW work is keeping him crazy busy. He doesn’t get into SL too often. And while he does put out new mesh clothing, as well as continuing to sell older pieces for BOM, he stopped throwing his lavish and apparently expensive parties!

So, here’s a few photos, mostly of Ellen Huet, sometimes me, and occasionally others, wearing gorgeous Hugo’s Designs latex outfits both past and present.

~ Kate