Retailers Ask: What Brand Will Your Avatar Be Wearing?

You got up this morning. You put on your sale-bin sweater and hand-me-down jeans, or perhaps your second-hand suit. But what will your avatar wear? With the fashion industry tapping into social networking sites, it’s no longer a silly question.

Retailers have targeted a new niche market: online alter-egos. Brand name designers (Mark Jacobs and Valentino to name a few) are collaborating with online entertainment media to offer their products for purchase and use online.

But the spillover of the fashion world onto the digital world has many people uncomfortable: on the one hand, it seems retailers are polluting an edenic online space, imposing the production-consumption model of Western capitalism onto the virtual world.