Lolita Blog Carnival: Tailoring Your Wardrobe: Making It Work & Suit You

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Lolita Blog Carnival entry!

This topic in particular was PERFECT for me, because I myself am looking to be a professional tailor, stylist, and fashion designer!

I love to fix, alter, and create clothes that work for many different kinds of people, especially those who are into Lolita, and I also love to style outfits and make things work in so many different ways, so I am very excited to share some tips today!

When it comes to tailoring your Lolita wardrobe and making it cohesive, there are a few things that are very important to know.

1. What cuts and styles suit you best, and what is more comfortable for you.

2. How often you wear Lolita, and where do you wear it.

3. What substyle of Lolita, as well as your style out of Lolita, you wear most of the time.

Let's begin!


Cuts and Styles of Lolita Garments

The most common cuts and other garment structures in Lolita dresses are:

A-Line

Just-Waist

Babydoll

Some common collar styles in blouses are:

High Collar

Peter Pan

Low-Neckline

There are many different structures to Lolita dresses, blouses, and skirts, so the most important thing is to find the different cuts and structures you believe not only look great on you and are tailored to your height and body, but are also more comfortable for you. So here are some great tips if you want to get the most out of Lolita.

If you know how to sew and you're pretty confident in it, here are some things I personally believe you should know how to do when it comes to Lolita.

1. How to hem and sew on lace.
2. How to replace a zipper.
3. How to sew buttonholes, and how to sew on buttons.
4. How to make a shirring panel.
5. How to embroider!

BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT Rose Embroidery JSK
Kamikaze Girls (2004)

If you don't know how to sew, or if your skills are not on a professional level, here are a few very little things you can learn to do that can make a big difference in a dress.

1. How to replace a button.
2. How to tie a back ribbon with a waist tie.
3. How to make a little bow to attach anywhere on a dress.
4. How to add details to any accessory such as a hat, headband, etc.
5. How to make accessories!

(You can easily look for many tutorials on Pinterest! I will post some tutorials of my own at a later time!)

Or if you are willing and able to invest and get the best out of Lolita, get to know a good tailor!

I'm not just saying that because I'm looking to be one, I'm saying this so that you can get to know someone who could make your dream dress fit YOU comfortably, whatever body type you have!

It comes to show, you don't have to fit yourself to the dress when it is much easier to make the dress fit you!


When to wear Lolita

Depending on the person, Lolita can be worn anytime one wishes to wear it.
However, it is known for being an impractical fashion style.

So another important thing to consider when making up your wardrobe is how often you wear Lolita and where will you wear it to! Consider these questions the next time you think about splurging on something you may not even wear as often as you would like to.

What do you do for work and/or school?

What do you do for fun?

How often do you go to Lolita meetups/events?

For example:

I plan to work in an office once I finish school, so let's say I get an office job.
Of course, professional attire is required.

Misako Aoki

With college this semester, I have early morning classes, which means I wouldn't have much time to get ready unless I woke up at 5:30 every morning.
So I most likely may not wear Lolita as much as I would like to during the day, or I have to keep it simple. Also, I have to carry a lot such as my books, and my bento box, since I'm at school for a big majority of the day.

ALICE AND THE PIRATES
DIDOLuLaLa Regimental OP

BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT
School Bag

What I like to do for fun is shopping, going out for tea and macarons, sewing or blogging at home, going to small rock band shows, and a little bit of traveling every now and then!
So I like to be on the go most of the time, but I also like to be comfortable at home.

From the movie adaptation of
Musashino-Sen no Shimai

As for meetups/events, there are not a lot of meetups around my area, and the nearest ones are usually very far, so I don't attend meetups or events as much as I want to. When I do, I prefer to dress and pack light.

After knowing all of that, I can prioritize what types of Lolita dresses, skirts,  bags, and blouses work best with my wardrobe, how many of each I should have, what to invest more in, etc.

It becomes a lot easier to make your wardrobe work together very well, and it saves you quite a bit of money, and maybe some room in your closet!


Substyles of Lolita

The top three most common Lolita substyles are:

Gothic

Twilight of the Rose ~Bride of the Death~ OP

ALICE AND THE PIRATES

Sweet

Kira☆Kira Parfait OP
BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT

Classic

Lady Victorian Rose Jewelry ~A Wish on the Rose Petals~ OP
BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT

When buying Lolita dresses, I believe it is very efficient to have a cohesive wardrobe for both your "normal" clothes, and for Lolita. It makes the wardrobe look more put together, and it makes it a lot easier to choose what to wear for the week!

For example, I like to incorporate my own Lolita accessories into my normal clothes, and vice versa, so I buy normal clothes that have frills, lace, etc. and fit into my general color scheme in Lolita fashion, which for me, the main color is black, and I sometimes wear white and/or pastels such as light pink, lavender, and sax, and the occasional gobelin print!

Sonnet for Juliet Gobelins JSK
BABY THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT

(If you're not one for incorporating Lolita into your every day wear, then that's okay! What's important is what works best for you!)

I believe it is very efficient and less stressful when your entire wardrobe just works together and looks great, so get creative with it!

So those are my tips on how to tailor your Lolita wardrobe and make it work well for you!

Thank you for reading this Lolita Blog Carnival entry!

Please have a look at these other blogs below!

The Bloody Tea Party

Cupcakes and Unicorns
In Love with a Dream

-Blandis

Lolita Blog Carnival: Differences between Lolita Now verses Lolita Five Years Ago

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!

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.

TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from June 2013

TokyoFashion.com Street Snap from January 2014

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.

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!

The Bloody Tea Party

-Blandis