Yesterday I attended the Faces of the Darklands fashion show, and when I was getting dressed for it, I wanted to limit prims to help with the lag I knew we would all encounter at the event. At the time, I didn’t have the current release client installed, so I was making some educated guesses about what to wear rather than using the avatar rendering cost (ARC) numbers. For my final outfit, I decided to take off the shoes and keep my hair to put my total number of prims at 58.

This outfit started with the pants from the Hacker set at Exile because the shading on them is so flattering. I wanted to balance that out on top with something maybe just a bit more feminine. I thought a jacket of some sort would work well, so I did a search for “jacket” in my inventory. Because I do so much mixing and matching, I’ve added the layer information to the name of many of my items to make it easier to just look for items on the particular layers I have free as I’m building the outfit.

I found the jacket from Seraph set, but it’s a short jacket, so I knew I wanted something underneath it. The cutout in the back of the jacket reminded me of the back of the Lolita top from silentsparrow‘s Beloved set, and I love the way the two pieces mirror each other to create that diamond-shaped opening in the back. Hyasynth’s clothing always has such amazing details, and the bows and corseting add that touch of femininity I wanted. With so much black and gray going on, I decided to wear one of my favorite Exile hair shades, violet dawn, to add a bit of fun color.

After the fashion show, I found myself wondering more about ARC, so I downloaded and installed the release client. In this outfit without shoes, I was in the green zone with a rating of 242 and even with shoes, the rating stayed green at 527. It was actually an interesting exercise to go through several of my favorite items and outfits to see how they stacked up. While it was easy to add on things to take the rating into the red zone, my favorite looks maxed out around 1500 or so in the yellow zone, so I learned that it’s actually not that difficult to stay in the green zone for large gatherings like fashion shows. I was a little surprised that just taking off my prim lashes shaved about 150 points off the score, so those will definitely be coming off before I go to areas where I’m anticipating lots of people and lag.

Details about all the items in this outfit after the cut.

Hair: Clara in violet dawn by Exile

Skin: LF Chai – Cream – Siyu

Eyes: Royal Ivy cat eyes by Shine

Manicure: Sin Skins Glitter Manicure Black

Jacket: from the ashes Seraph set by silentsparrow

Shirt: Lolita top from the Beloved set by silentsparrow

Pants: from the Hacker set by Exile

Socks: Shiny Things Knit knee socks – charcoal

Shoes: Shiny Things black Flare Oxfords