Homeless Woman Makes Good (And Clothing) In Second Life

Read the whole article at Indianapolis Monthly

Five years ago, Veronica Brown was homeless. Now she is achieving real fame and fortune in the virtual world.

By Megan Fernandez

Wearing antennae on her raven bob, Simone Stern sashays through the showroom of Style Starts Here, one of four clothing boutiques she owns and stocks exclusively with her designs. The shop has the soaring proportions of an airport terminal and ocean views at nearly every turn. And yet, the floor is bare. In place of racks of clothes, garments are displayed as pictures on the walls. Each photo is like a billboard, as tall as Stern herself, and each shows an outfit on a model.

The designer’s busty friend Brace Coral approaches, looking like she has come from the Playboy mansion in thong underwear and a skimpy tank top. This is not Stern’s work. Her style is better exemplified by the Simone number she herself is wearing, a black cocktail dress with spaghetti straps and an empire waist that creates soft, pretty movement when she walks. Or flies. Bidding goodbye to her friend, Stern levitates and floats across the store.

The airborne designer and her island-based store exist only on a computer screen, in the breakthrough—and often bizarre—online realm known as Second Life. Top fashion designer Simone Stern is really 47-year-old Indy eastsider Veronica Brown, a former truck driver who has reinvented herself as one of the first successful entrepreneurs in the emerging economy of the virtual world. Controlling Simone Stern from her laptop at Lazy Daze Coffeehouse in Irvington, Brown looks a bit tough, wearing nondescript black pants, an untucked blouse, and metal-studded clogs, cutting neither the ultra-chic nor kooky image one might expect from the prominent clothing designer she has become. It’s unlikely that Brown, lacking professional training, could live out this fantasy in the real world. But in the fantasy world of Second Life, she’s a bona fide fashion queen.