Hello everyone, and welcome to the first Lolita Blog Carnival post to this blog!
In case you don't know, Lolita Blog Carnival is a Facebook group of Lolita Bloggers who get together every week to write on a weekly topic related to Lolita Fashion.
This week's topic: Lolita Now verses Lolita Five Years Ago!
Now almost 6 years ago, I graduated high school, and I was just starting to get into Lolita. I went through a Sugary Sweet phase where I was all about pastels and sweet prints, as most beginner Lolitas are.
It was very short-lived, and frankly.....a bit embarrassing for me!
It was very short-lived, and frankly.....a bit embarrassing for me!
So from my perspective, back then, Sweet Lolita was the most popular substyle of Lolita. Pastel colored hair, OTT accessories, sweets themes, as well as other pastel palette styles like fairy kei were very present and very loud in Lolita fashion.
Angelic Pretty was a brand I heard the most about when I was first getting into Lolita. The current designers, Maki and Asuka, were seen as trendsetters in Lolita. At that time, colorful sweet prints, high hair, and multiple accessories were although not new trends, very popular in Lolita. (Images from the Tokyo Rebel blog.)
With Angelic Pretty's growing brand came the rising popularity of Sweet Lolita. Soon enough, the majority of Lolitas were Sweet Lolitas, and that was the image most people had in mind when they hear about J-Fashion, or see clothes similar to Sweet Lolita being marketed by mainstream Western clothing companies.
Of course with the growth and development of social media, Lolita fashion became more widespread and accessible to Western countries than it was back in the 1990s. When I first got into Lolita back in high school, back in 2011, I found the fashion through a crazy and completely unintentional visit to BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT in San Francisco. When I was getting into it, I was able to look it up through the internet and find many Western sites writing about Lolita fashion, as well as finding out that BABY and Angelic Pretty both have USA stores in person, and online. Little did I know, most Western Lolitas back in the late 1990s had very little access to the fashion, except through fashion magazines from Japan that were very hard to come by at the time.
By 2013, I was a Junior in high school taking classes on sewing. At that time, I was always checking the EGL Comm sales, as well as for new blog posts/YouTube videos from Tokyo Rebel and BABY SF. At that time, I was a lone Lolita and was not involved in any Lolita communities then, so everything I knew about Lolita fashion was from blog posts, videos, and social media posts by Lolita models and Influencers like Misako Aoki.
As for Lolita fashion today, Lolita is a lot more toned down than it was five years ago. More Lolitas have cleaned up the look, even in OTT looks. With less accessories and more clean, and intricate detailed prints or plain colors with trims and textures rather than just sweets all over the place, Lolita fashion is surely a lot more classy and perfectionist than it was five years ago, or when the fashion first began to emerge on the streets of Harajuku, Japan back in the late 1990s.
This year, Mana, designer of Moi-Meme-Moitie and former lead guitarist of visual kei band Malice Mizer, made a comeback after the brand was dropped from Gothic Lolita Bible back in 2016, the magazine which was later discontinued along with well-known Japanese fashion magazine KERA, in 2017.
Lolita secondhand store Wunderwelt, known for selling Lolita pieces secondhand, now sells the brand, new and used.
Mana has also made a couple of appearances in the United States in 2018, with another one in Hawaii scheduled later this year. With the comeback of Mana and Moi-Meme-Moitie comes the revamp of Gothic Lolita.
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| TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from June 2013 |
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| TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from January 2014 |
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| TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from September 2013 |
Of course with the growth and development of social media, Lolita fashion became more widespread and accessible to Western countries than it was back in the 1990s. When I first got into Lolita back in high school, back in 2011, I found the fashion through a crazy and completely unintentional visit to BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT in San Francisco. When I was getting into it, I was able to look it up through the internet and find many Western sites writing about Lolita fashion, as well as finding out that BABY and Angelic Pretty both have USA stores in person, and online. Little did I know, most Western Lolitas back in the late 1990s had very little access to the fashion, except through fashion magazines from Japan that were very hard to come by at the time.
By 2013, I was a Junior in high school taking classes on sewing. At that time, I was always checking the EGL Comm sales, as well as for new blog posts/YouTube videos from Tokyo Rebel and BABY SF. At that time, I was a lone Lolita and was not involved in any Lolita communities then, so everything I knew about Lolita fashion was from blog posts, videos, and social media posts by Lolita models and Influencers like Misako Aoki.
As for Lolita fashion today, Lolita is a lot more toned down than it was five years ago. More Lolitas have cleaned up the look, even in OTT looks. With less accessories and more clean, and intricate detailed prints or plain colors with trims and textures rather than just sweets all over the place, Lolita fashion is surely a lot more classy and perfectionist than it was five years ago, or when the fashion first began to emerge on the streets of Harajuku, Japan back in the late 1990s.
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| TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from April 2018 |
This year, Mana, designer of Moi-Meme-Moitie and former lead guitarist of visual kei band Malice Mizer, made a comeback after the brand was dropped from Gothic Lolita Bible back in 2016, the magazine which was later discontinued along with well-known Japanese fashion magazine KERA, in 2017.
 |
| Mana in Gothic Lolita Bible |
Lolita secondhand store Wunderwelt, known for selling Lolita pieces secondhand, now sells the brand, new and used.
Mana has also made a couple of appearances in the United States in 2018, with another one in Hawaii scheduled later this year. With the comeback of Mana and Moi-Meme-Moitie comes the revamp of Gothic Lolita.
 |
| Moi-Meme-Moitie Models from Sakura-Con 2018 in Seattle, Washington |
Like any fashion style, trends change over time. I will not make any predictions as to what could trend in the next few years, because truly, who knows how the fashion will change in the next five years?
Thank you for reading this Lolita blog Carnival entry! Check out another entry below!
-Blandis
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