You can still visit American Apparel’s much-hyped digital outpost in Second Life, the user-generated virtual Internet world, but the store has been chained shut since last summer when the hipster clothing chain announced it would close its doors on “Lerappa Island for now.”
Was the company’s departure triggered by a virtual terrorist attack? (a group called the Second Life Liberation Army gunned down virtual shoppers at American Apparel to protest the commercialization of the site).
Or low traffic?
Other companies like Reebok, Adidas, and Starwood Hotels have also closed their Second Life stores because they were not making a profit.
It turns out American Apparel was just moving to a younger, hipper digital market, MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side, which opened to the public in January.
The site urges new visitors to stop by the American Apparel vLES store to “get actual, literal clothes that you can put on your actual, literal body. Then you can get virtual clothes for your avatar too, which is pretty awesome”.
No avatars over 30 are allowed at vLES by the way.
