Mannequins/tailor forms/placeholder NPCs to make outfits for the opposite gender

Suggested in Quick Suggestions in the server, figured I’d expand more here:

Could be limited to tailors or businesses if necessary, but please consider implementing some form of mannequin or NPC “assistant” we could utilize to create clothing for the opposite gender. I am writing this primarily from a tailor’s perspective.

Right now there is no other way to make clothing for the opposite gender without:
A. Making an alt (possibly unwanted, asset transfer issues, glorified prop)
B. Hiring someone (nice for RP, but if you’re slow then there is no financial incentive whatsoever. You are more likely to lose money than anything.)

With option A, you can theoretically make the outfit, grab the information, then hop onto your main and just tell the client what to buy for themselves – but that is much slower, more tedious, and makes it harder to charge for the service than if you can just hand them a tailor’s ticket. If you give them a tailor’s ticket (therefore spending the extra money to actually make the outfit), the alt must be with them when presenting it anyway.

With option B, the limit of time makes it difficult for those of us that take forever in the tailor, not to mention the coordination of food and water core maintenance (especially on a character that is unlikely to be actually storybased.) It’s an unnecessary and expensive step. You can use option A in tandem with option B, where you grab the information on an alt and then have a person of the opposite gender make the outfit for you, but that still requires extra time and funds to feed the prop alt PLUS the fee of hiring someone PLUS the fees for the outfit and tailor’s ticket. That would grow exorbitant quickly.

I have seen dressforms used as decoration in the server already. Having one utilized for its actual purpose is not so far a leap, but I don’t know if there are ones geared towards male figures. Better yet would be a “hireable” NPC that perhaps you pay a fee to use, therefore treating them as an employee (your own, an employee at the tailor’s in general, doesn’t matter), that you can dress up. The money from it comes from your own bank account and you can save the outfit yourself, then give the tailor’s ticket to the client directly. The outfits can be sorted Male / Female in the wardrobe through the addition of a category, a tailor can just create their own naming convention to tell the difference (F_OutfitName, M_OutfitName), or there could be a basic tagging system that shows what they are.

This also promotes RP because it allows the opposite gender client to look around the NPC/mannequin as the outfit is being built, much like when building an outfit for someone of the same gender, and make requests. The tailor doesn’t have to do the character switch shuffle, which slows RP down, or deal with general asset transfer stickiness. It also has the added benefit of making costs more manageable/eliminating most of the unnecessary fees one would struggle with when utilizing an alt.