Clothing

Clothes are important. Most foreign speakers find it a terrible word to pronounce, but besides, it means expressing your style, as a business card to the rest of the world. Hi, this is me. All virtual worlds know this and advertise their possibilities to make your personal avatar. So does Habbo. All Habbos start with the same basic Habbo avatar (well, the boy and girl ones are slightly different), and it’s up to you whether you want to fit in or stand out of the crowd. All is equal, so all can be different.

Habbos used to be even more equal to each other than they are now. In earlier days, newly created avatars were all wearing the same ‘Monitorimatti-look’ (see right). The collection of clothes and the amount of categories was quite a bit smaller than nowadays, which made looks more ‘basic’. You could only change your look in the hotel view inside the client, along with other personal preferences such as your password. The choice of clothes got slightly bigger in the Public Cinema and Habbo Lido. When you entered the cinema’s stage around the time of Habbo Switzerland’s opening (October 2001), you were given a choice of several costumes which could only be worn there (until scripters found out how to wear them everywhere and the feature was removed) - . Swimming suits could be worn in the Lido, by entering a changing-room and choosing your favorite colour - . This used to be a Lido-only feature, until the release of Water Patches and VIP Bathsuits.

The collection of clothes stayed the same for a long while, with only a small addition for the Chinese New Year in v11. Habbo always seemed to be busy with more important stuff than clothes, until we got to v18. Habbo got to be Web 2.0, and the looks had been still looking quite 1.0. So new clothes and lots of accessoiries were added. The colours you could choose from were also updated, which lead to some complaining users who missed their green hair or that unique tone of blue. Those who really couldn’t miss their unique ‘old’ colour were to never change their look anymore - there’s still some ‘oldskool’ Habbos around (or at least that’s what they like to call themselves). V18 also made creating the loved Habbo-stickers impossible. See below for an overview of colour choice before and after v18. Please note that before v18, the choice of colours depended of the piece of clothing you chose to wear.

Before v18:


After v18:

Slowly, Habbo’s homepage got more important, and some former client-only featured could also be used on the homepage. This included changing your look. V11 introduced a new, easy clothing-feature on the homepage. Colours could be picked more easily and you view your new look from various angles. Later, this turned out to be a total replacement of the feature in the client. It was not until v38 that the feature was brought back to the client, in the dark grey ‘Beta’-style. Since v53, you’re not the only one to decide what your Habbo looks like. The new Football furniture range included the Football Gate, which lets the owner decide what the people walking through it will wear. Changing your look in different versions - .

After v18, several other accessoiries and clothes were added once in a while. Not everyone was satisfied though. When Habbo got to Beta/v34, users were asked for their suggestions. A lot of people asked for new outfits, so Sulake made a promise to work on those. In v49, a new membership called VIP was introduced with a Habbo Fashion campaign. The campaign included a worldwide competition: users could design a new Habbo outfit, and the winning outfit, chosen by super famous Miley Cyrus would be released as ‘real’ Habbo clothes. User Rykz made the winning outfit, which was released in v51. Since then, new clothes and accessories (mostly exclusive to VIP) are added regularly.