Getting featured in the Bloomingdale’s holiday catalog as a “Chic Treat Under $100” is just the kind of present every up-and-coming clothing designer hopes to find under the tree.

But the fashion line Boy Meets Girl, whose $78 “Coco” decorated hoodie has been so favored this year, hopes to leverage that good fortune even further by offering a virtual version of its real-life shirt in an online world.

It’s an interesting experiment in whether digital exposure can drive real-world sales. If it works as planned, girls will be able to dress their avatars in Fashion Fantasy Game in a digitized version of the same clothing they’ll ask their friends and relatives for at the holidays.

All members of Fashion Fantasy Game , a digital world where the 13-to-18 demographic can design shareable clothing and set up retail shops to sell those virtual threads, can receive a Web version of the Boy Meets Girl hoodie for their avatars. They can also take part in an interactive apparel design competition meant to produce the next market product for Boy Meets Girl, after watching the company’s Spring 2010 runway show in the Fashion Fantasy social space, the R. Lilly Café.

“I’ve been really fascinated by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter—the online social world,” says Boy Meets Girl founder and creative director Stacy Igel. “For me, this world is my audience to build a brand and awareness in the marketplace, and also to get new inspiration and ideas from.

“It was just a natural move to join with Fashion Fantasy World at this time: I’m in the two Bloomingdale’s holiday catalogs right now and my distribution is in 33 contemporary Bloomingdale’s stores and online. So I really wanted to see how these things could be married together in this virtual world.”

Besides dressing their avatar in a hoodie that they themselves will hopefully aspire to own, FFG members—now numbering almost a million, all in North America—can submit outfits designed around the Coco hoodie and post them to the FFG site. Igel herself will pick 20 finalists just before Christmas, the members will get to vote for their favorite, and the most popular look will win a hoodie and an annual VIP membership to the FFG site.,

That premium membership gives FFG players access to things like special fabrics for their designs, wigs, shoes and other accessories for their avatars, and ads for their retail shops in the in-game “Runway Magazine”. Number two and three vote-getters will also get Coco hoodies and smaller VIP packages.

Igel opted to work with Fashion Fantasy Game rather than some of the other dress-up worlds on the Web because it offers a pretty full-featured ground-level education in the practical side of the cloak and suit business. Members (okay, we’ll drop the pretense, mostly girls) choose whether to specialize in design or retail. Designers get to invent their own clothing lines; but they also have to decide where to get them produced for the lowest cost and how to get them placed into the retail shops that other members run. Those shopkeepers have to choose where to locate, rent a storefront for virtual bucks, design a logo and draw in paying customers.

And producers or merchants, everyone in Fashion Fantasy Game is a shopper, spending Fashion Bucks that they have either earned in-world or bought via PayPal to equip their avatar with digital duds.

“My challenge as a young designer and entrepreneur was learning that you have to show your garment, you have to push, you have to advertise,” Igel says. “These girls are really exposed to doing all that in this world and really learn something—without really knowing that they’re learning.”

That educational bent was intentional, says Nancy Ganz, who founded Fashion Fantasy Game in 2008 after a successful career in the garment business herself. (She developed the Bodyslimmers line of intimate apparel and sold it to Warnaco in the mid-‘90s.)

After taking a few years to raise a family, Ganz re-entered the apparel world with a tween clothing line, R.Lilly Tuckerwear. “That’s when I realized I had no desire to produce clothes anymore,” she says. “I wanted to do it all virtually. That’s why I love working with designers like Stacy—because they’re doing all the hard production stuff involved with making wonderful designs for teenagers.”

“Except now I want to do it virtually,” Igel interjects. “You’re taking me to the other side.”

Getting featured in the Bloomingdale’s holiday catalog as a “Chic Treat Under $100” is just the kind of present every up-and-coming clothing designer hopes to find under the tree.

But the fashion line Boy Meets Girl, whose $78 “Coco” decorated hoodie has been so favored this year, hopes to leverage that good fortune even further by offering a virtual version of its real-life shirt in an online world.

It’s an interesting experiment in whether digital exposure can drive real-world sales. If it works as planned, girls will be able to dress their avatars in Fashion Fantasy Game in a digitized version of the same clothing they’ll ask their friends and relatives for at the holidays.

All members of Fashion Fantasy Game , a digital world where the 13-to-18 demographic can design shareable clothing and set up retail shops to sell those virtual threads, can receive a Web version of the Boy Meets Girl hoodie for their avatars. They can also take part in an interactive apparel design competition meant to produce the next market product for Boy Meets Girl, after watching the company’s Spring 2010 runway show in the Fashion Fantasy social space, the R. Lilly Café.

“I’ve been really fascinated by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter—the online social world,” says Boy Meets Girl founder and creative director Stacy Igel. “For me, this world is my audience to build a brand and awareness in the marketplace, and also to get new inspiration and ideas from.

“It was just a natural move to join with Fashion Fantasy World at this time: I’m in the two Bloomingdale’s holiday catalogs right now and my distribution is in 33 contemporary Bloomingdale’s stores and online. So I really wanted to see how these things could be married together in this virtual world.”

Besides dressing their avatar in a hoodie that they themselves will hopefully aspire to own, FFG members—now numbering almost a million, all in North America—can submit outfits designed around the Coco hoodie and post them to the FFG site. Igel herself will pick 20 finalists just before Christmas, the members will get to vote for their favorite, and the most popular look will win a hoodie and an annual VIP membership to the FFG site.,

That premium membership gives FFG players access to things like special fabrics for their designs, wigs, shoes and other accessories for their avatars, and ads for their retail shops in the in-game “Runway Magazine”. Number two and three vote-getters will also get Coco hoodies and smaller VIP packages.

Igel opted to work with Fashion Fantasy Game rather than some of the other dress-up worlds on the Web because it offers a pretty full-featured ground-level education in the practical side of the cloak and suit business. Members (okay, we’ll drop the pretense, mostly girls) choose whether to specialize in design or retail. Designers get to invent their own clothing lines; but they also have to decide where to get them produced for the lowest cost and how to get them placed into the retail shops that other members run. Those shopkeepers have to choose where to locate, rent a storefront for virtual bucks, design a logo and draw in paying customers.

And producers or merchants, everyone in Fashion Fantasy Game is a shopper, spending Fashion Bucks that they have either earned in-world or bought via PayPal to equip their avatar with digital duds.

“My challenge as a young designer and entrepreneur was learning that you have to show your garment, you have to push, you have to advertise,” Igel says. “These girls are really exposed to doing all that in this world and really learn something—without really knowing that they’re learning.”

That educational bent was intentional, says Nancy Ganz, who founded Fashion Fantasy Game in 2008 after a successful career in the garment business herself. (She developed the Bodyslimmers line of intimate apparel and sold it to Warnaco in the mid-‘90s.)

After taking a few years to raise a family, Ganz re-entered the apparel world with a tween clothing line, R.Lilly Tuckerwear. “That’s when I realized I had no desire to produce clothes anymore,” she says. “I wanted to do it all virtually. That’s why I love working with designers like Stacy—because they’re doing all the hard production stuff involved with making wonderful designs for teenagers.”

“Except now I want to do it virtually,” Igel interjects. “You’re taking me to the other side.”