Having gotten an initial look, one that’s arguably a bit formal, I decided I wanted a second outfit that I could change into, something for those “kick back and have fun” days. Ideally, I wanted separates that I could mix and match with my tweed suit. With only $300L to spend, I was pretty sure I’d end up with just pants and shirt. WIth those criteria, I headed off in search.
The Task
Get a second – more casual – outfit.
The Budget
$300L for a great shirt and jeans.
The Shirt
There are a lot of shirts — pullovers, layers, prim collars and cuffs. It’s boggling. I wanted something “fun” and a little different, maybe a classic bowling shirt or a Hawaiian. 
That reminded me of Ryan’s “Getting Wet” post and I headed over to SHIKI to look for the flower patterns. I found them on the second floor and fell in love with the Hibiscus pattern. Going by the image on the vendor, I figured it for a jacket layer and was very pleasantly surprised to find that it came with a shirt layer as well for $165L. That was more than half my budget but it was so worth it to get a great piece like this.
The Jeans
It seems like everybody does jeans but it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart from the freebie jeans. After about an hour of rummaging through “men’s fashion jeans” in Search (I *hate* waiting for the rez), I went to The Authority and found Blink Pinion’s post on “Jeans: The Right Fit”. 
Most of those listed were out of my price range, but the Elephant Outfitter’s “Classic Elephant” jeans looked interesting. They’ve got just the right amount of detail, have a nice distinctive look, and I liked the color choices. With my new hibiscus shirt, they looked really good with the shirt tucked or not. There were two problems, however. The most obvious is price. At $145L, it takes my total to $310L. The second problem was less obvious but showed up when I tried on some of my “freebie filler” items.
The bare-midriff look might be charming on young ladies, but on men? Not so much. The SHIKI shirt works around this nicely by providing a pair of textured underwear that fills in the missing inches of shirt and matches the jacket layer exactly. Normal shirts, freebie t’s, and the like? Hardly.
So, back on the hunt and I found ZB Men’s Clothing with some really decent looking clothes and their ZB Waterfall Jeans. 
These come in a variety of configurations aimed, not doubt, at the “pants down crowd” from the “Young Urban League of Ordinary Gentlemen” but the also have a more traditional “yes, I wear my pants pulled up, thank you” look. The bonus in this pack is that ZB provides two pairs of jeans — a tucked-in look (pictured right) that works with the standard shirt, and an “untucked” look with a lower waistband for the “untucked” look that works very well. At $100L, this pair of jeans was just what I was looking for. While the look may not be quite as detailed as the EO pair, the combination of SHIKI Hibiscus and ZB Waterfall Jeans comes in at $265L, well under my $300L budget.
Of course, the downside is that I bought the Elephant Outfitter jeans because I was willing to go over budget to get such a great looking pair of jeans and so I’m actually $110L over budget for this post. I’ve got some nice jeans, though, and I learned a lot about pants in SL.
The Goods
In other news, you may have noted a change in my basic look. There’s a new post coming on that, but I wanted to get this information out before I forgot how it all went down.
