Can mesh clothes be worn on a classic body?

[Bree Shan]

I have been on SL for a very long time, and I am actually very happy with my classic AV. 
But, when I go looking for clothes I find that most of it is mesh. Can I still wear them?

[StevenSmith1]

Yes you can still wear them but they might not fit as well as you want compared to classic clothes. Make sure to click add when putting mesh clothes on 

[Angelina String]

Still plenty of designers out there making mesh clothing in standard sizes for the classic body - and you can get templates for your body corresponding with those sizes from the marketplace to get them to fit quite good.

In many cases the clothes comes with an alpha mask to hide parts of your body, so they might even be easier to fit than mesh clothing on a mesh body... 

Look for the standard sizing logo on the posters/ads for the clothing

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Standard-Sizing-Package-Male-Female/3717612

[Claireschen Hesten]

I found myself having to go mesh the amount of system sized stuff was dwindling and what there was very often didn't fit my shape. If you see something you like rigged for a mesh body demo it, it will very likely not fit as is but if you have any alpha layers from other clothing it may mean you can wear the item. when i was system i found there were clothes where the included mesh body sizes often Maitreya fitted better than any of the available system Av sizes. it is a bit drastic/more effort than you might want to put in but you could start creating your own alpha layers to wear with mesh body sized clothes

[Scylla Rhiadra]

I've never tried wearing clothing made for a particular mesh body (i.e., Freya, Maitreya, Slink, et al.) on a system body, but I'm not surprised that it should work, and maybe better than the standard sizes in some cases.

One sort of caveat about alpha layers and standard sizes: depending on how well the alpha layers have been made, they can actually sometimes work better than using alpha cuts on a mesh body (which is where you selectively choose which parts of a mesh body to render invisible), because the cut of the outfit often does not match the arrangement of the way in which the mesh body has been segmented into "slices" or "cuts" that you can choose to render invisible. So, generally, alpha layers and standard sizes work very well on system avatars, and sometimes better than they do on mesh avatar bodies.

That said, problems with alpha layers and standard sized outfits can arise if you are using an avatar shape that deviates too much from the "norm." That's because reshaping your body essentially stretches the alpha layer painted on top of it, while the standard sized clothing you're wearing above that does not stretch. This means that the invisible portions of the alpha layer may not correspond as exactly to the parts of the body that are supposed to be hidden under your clothing as they originally did.