Last year I wrote about a trend I'd noticed among Second Life's stores -- in-world shops that had once sprawled across quarter or even full sims and practically swallowed you whole when you walked in had been shrinking to join a trend of cozy boutiques, supplementing the reduced floor space with marketplace shops that could contain a designers entire virtual career. At the time, I speculated that the simultaneously rising cost of land and visibility of the Second Life Marketplace provided a fairly tidy explaination of what was happening.

Massive money-making brands were never as common as they were made out to be, and for every designer raking it on on their sim, there were 5 other designers stretching themselves a little too thin to make it seem like they were doing just as well. It's possible then that many designers decided to pocket more of their profits instead of investing in the rising cost of land.

There were also multiple cases of designers contracting creators to produce content for them, allowing them to manage their business while still producing a high volume of content. This still happens, but following the disappearances of several high-profile brands suspected of doing just that (you'll hear plenty of murmurs about shoe brand Stiletto Moody in particular), many fashionistas have been left wondering if those contractors didn't decide that they could make more money from their work on their own.

Then of course there's always burn out. Producing the volume of content necessary to keep a big brand afloat is more than a full-time job, and doing it while simultaneously trying to raise a family as many SL creators are... Burn out is practically inevitable for designers working on their own, and the world of Second Life fashion is notoriously fickle. When you start taking a few months between releases instead of a few weeks, you can easily find yourself forgotten.

There are still several large brands that seem as strong now as they ever were, so it could always be a case of plain old confirmation bias on my part. Perhaps I'm seeing fewer massive brands (and many more downsized ones) than I once did because that's what I'm expecting to see, or because that's just where I personally prefer to shop these days. That's why I want to know what you think: Am I seeing a decline that's just not there, or have so many of those powerhouse brands (with a few notable exceptions) disappeared like dinosaurs? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.</