Armani Sets Up Shop In Second Life? Armani?!

When virtual worlds – Second Life, in particular – first went online, there was considerable buzz built around the newly established market. Their dimensions were fresh with intrigue and interesting possibilities, and, well, lots of people ran with those ideas. In the months following its launch, Second Life took off in a big way. Later, however, after all the bubble wrap was removed and all users took to their own personal roles, so to speak, things kind of grew stagnant. Today, things in the Web’s largest virtual world aren’t so “huge” in an attention-grabbing way as they once were. The buzz, in short, has died.

So I wonder, why has the business world – the real business world – still kept a keen eye on those thousands and thousands (I’m sorry, but I simply cannot believe SL is home to millions of active members) of intangible avatars? Just yesterday, Reuters published a report on renowned fashion house Armani’s opening of a shop “modeled on [its] flagship location in Milan” in the virtual world.

Come on. Really? Armani? Really? I’m interested to know just how many in Second Life are thoroughly consumed with overpriced luxury fabrics. I presume most everyone commandeering the characters living under that Linden Lab-borne digital sun are outfitted in uber-casual attire purchased from sources far, far from Milan and the oh-too-trendy strip of the couture, Fifth Ave. How could the marketing department at Armani even consider this move? It’s asinine.

Let’s look big-picture here for a minute. Second Life has clearly lost the allure it once had. (Mind you, even in its prime it wasn’t a place I personally wished to venture.) The place is almost wholly a one-zero-one-zero equivalent of a Burning Man convention. Strange structures abound. Nearly all those roaming the place look quite different than they do in the physical world. And there’s pretty much an “anything goes”-like ethics and legal structure.

Those, of course, aren’t necessarily negative things, but because it fits such a description, it’s difficult to think it a place where business transactions, particularly the kind involving real cash, should be performed – or even a place where legitimate businesses should take up residence at all.

Second Life (and other worlds like it) is a playground. It’s the sandbox in which almost everything is done because it’s not real. It is a communal imaginative exercise. Nothing more. Businesses should treat it as such, not open shop and call it corporate expansion.

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