I think I've decided to abandon Kelly Eden as a "freebies" experiment and concentrate instead on him as a "girly boy" experiment. This means focusing more on a look that is feminine but flat-chested and with relatively narrow hips and a smaller butt.
The problem I've found is that mesh clothing, which I thought would be perfect for hiding one's true figure, kind of does the opposite, and I knew this if I had paused to consider. The big problem with mesh clothing is that it forces you into a fairly narrow range of body options. For example, most women's mesh clothing assumes you have breasts -- "SL normal" breasts even, which seem fairly large. But of course, some people have much larger breasts and mesh clothing offers the same problems there. Mesh clothing also assumes you have a relatively narrow waist and ample booty, neither of which is strictly true for my character.
I could, of course, just buy all my clothing from Bare Rose -- they have a large line of "flat-chested" mesh clothes. But the problem with that is that Bare Rose really doesn't cater to "normal" clothing -- they're all about fantasy, science fiction, fetish clothing. (The fact that they cater to fetish clothing is almost certainly why they have a line of "flat-chested" mesh clothing options in the first place.) Generally I like that, and the great thing about Bare Rose is that you get full outfits for cheap (150.00 Linden typically). But if I just want a normal sweater and skirt I'm not likely to find it at Bare Rose.
A second problem is that a lot of SL clothing exposes the chest (why dress your perfect-body, perfect-complexion virtual self if you can't expose as much skin as possible?) and, for the most part, my girly boy has clear breasts even when I've flattened the chest. Female skin is designed that way, and I've been working mostly with freebie skins -- some really nice ones, granted, but only Mother Goose offers appliers that remove the breasts (for female child avatars -- not really intended for a boy avatar though it works), and Mother Goose is very scattershot about skin tones, and only offer the appliers in three skin tones which match maybe half of their skins. The really nice thing about Mother Goose is that they have so many freebies and dollarbies and the appliers are free also, so I was able to come up with a handful of girlish boy looks without breasts, but not for the skins that I really liked the best.
This leads me to Pink Fuel. There are probably other skin designers that cater to the kind of thing I'm looking for -- I know of one that specifically designs hermaphrodite skins -- but Pink Fuel does it really well and I like their skins. They offer a full range of appliers for all of their skin tones -- not just "boy-chest" appliers, but "small-breast" options, "girl-chest" options (for a female chest with no real breasts) and "muscular" options (for female body builders), along with the very standard "enhanced breast" options.
This will mean more of a money investment -- good skins are typically in the 1,000 linden range -- but the results will be worth it I think. But basically, going outside the standard body types in SL is a pain. It's a good experiment for me, to see what's possible, but it takes a lot of work to get the effect you want, especially if you're like me and want high-quality modern (which usually means mesh) clothing.
I need to do a more thorough post on this but for now here's some links:
http://femboyhuntsl.blogspot.com/
http://pinkfuel.tumblr.com/
http://barerose.xeraweb.com/index2.php
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