Blogspiration: Affrilliation Year 2, An Impressive Collection, & More!

Apparently, I'm only capable of making these blog roundup posts every six months! Not sure why I rarely do these, as I am always coming across interesting things to share.

First up is a post over on Kirakira Shoujo about a question that has been popping up since about 2001, is Lolita dying? It's not really a yes or no question, but Kirakira Shoujo writes an interesting article talking about the ebb and flow of Lolita's popularity! Lolita's not really going anywhere, and I'm not sure where people keep hearing this rumor, year after year, but the style is certainly always changing.

Affrilliation, the US's first exclusively Lolita convention has officially announced a second year! They've moved their con to a swankier new place and have started adding info about next year's con, which will take place the first of June! Check out their site for more info! Last year was considered a success and this upcoming one looks to be bigger and better!

Over on SkyScraperOpera's Tumblr I stumbled across this picture! It's a pretty amazing picture of their Alice & the Pirates Versailles Rose collection! I love this line because it's so striking and elegant. The pieces are classic Baby the Stars Shine Bright/Alice & the Pirates and they're all tied together with some gorgeous gold embroidery. I love seeing collections like this too! It takes some serious dedication and love to have a collection like this! One day I hope to have my own small collection of Meta's Antique Bouquet, one of my all time favorite brand series!

A common topic to pop up in the online Lolita communities is how to wear, or even if you should wear, Lolita to formal occasions. Over on Luna Rain, the blog's author talks a little bit about her experience of wearing a toned down Lolita outfit to a wedding and some general advice to keep in mind if you have a formal occasion to go to, but have nothing in your closet but frills!

A friend of mine just posted her adventures in this craft and I was blown away by how simple it seems! Check out this awesome tutorial! It's just puff paint and tulle but the results are so awesome looking! This was a tutorial posted for Halloween but when you wear Lolita, there are lots of occasions to get dressed up. I can imagine these masks in pastel colors for a Marie Antoinette Sweet Lolita themed masquerade look, in metallic gold to top off an OTT Classic styled outfit, or in Moitie blue to add a spooky touch to a Gothic Lolita outfit. 


Finally, I'd like to end this post with some pictures from the International Lolita Day tea party I went to in the beginning of December. These were all taken by Christina of Ramble Rori!

 At this particular meetup we had a guest speaker, Yuniya Kawamura, talk a bit about her recent book Fashioning Japanese Subcultures. Books that talk seriously about subcultures, let alone one that discusses Lolita, are few and far between, so this is definitely a book I hope to pick up sometime soon!

Maybe I'll update this little series of trips through other people's blogs more than once every 6 months, maybe not! But, until the next post, Merry Krampus!

Lolita Blog Carnival: Underrated Colors

Even though I've been working with it on Facebook, I've actually taken quite a break from doing any posts from the Lolita Blog Carnival myself lately! But I put my butt in gear to get this week's done, because it looked like a fun topic, this week is all about unusual colors within Lolita!

First I want to start with just a little bit of musing about why certain colors are considered "unusual" in Lolita. Generally, Lolita tends to be a very rule oriented fashion, and there are colors that are often perceived as being not just "normal" colors for Lolita, but sometimes they're considered the only acceptable colors, although, this has lightened up a bit in recent years. "Proper colors" seem to be largely decided by what sort of things brands are releasing, and as silly as it sounds, it's usually for an understandable reason. As I'm sure you all know, a head-to-toe matching outfit and even wardrobes is not uncommon at all in Lolita, and is even something that most Lolitas prefer, so it's generally just considered easier for Lolitas to pick one of the common colors and stick with it. It's easier to match that way if all of your clothes just so happen to be pink, sax blue, lavender, red, or black! It becomes a little less easy to find exactly what you're looking for when you throw every other color into the mix! It's a bit unfortunate for those who have very specific color inclinations, but a blessing to those who don't really intend to stray very far from the limited Lolita rainbow.

However, it's true that in recent years more and more colors have mixed themselves into the Lolita norm. I remember about 6 years ago a Lolita friend of mine was in love with the color green and dreamt of one day owning all the non-mint green brand released Lolita dresses. This was a pretty easy feat at the time, theoretically, as there were only about a dozen or so of them that were commonly known (Take a look at this search for "Green" grouped by year on Lolibrary!) . For the next few years brands started releasing more and more uncommon colors, and there was always a little bit of a murmur of commotion every time a brand released something in an odd color. "Did you see that yellow dress?" one Lolita might ask another, "Yes! Did you see that one that had mint and pink on it!?".

Nowadays, there are very few colors that Lolitas would ever be shocked to see, except maybe neon, but there are indeed a few colors that are still very underrepresented and often overlooked within the fashion!

Jewel tones that aren't burgundy or royal blue
 
I figured I would lump these all into one category, because there are a few of them, from rich purple, to emerald green, to deep amber. The most common jewel tones you'll see within Lolita are red and blue, but some of the other colors will pop up every now and then. I've even written a separate post about the color purple

Olive Green
Olive green will either come in a light and airy pale olive, or a more traditional olive green. Innocent World probably uses this color the mos, but even they hardly use it at all. For it's desaturated nature, it's almost always seen in dresses that are more inclined towards the Classic Lolita. I consider the paler version of olive as the "pastel" for the Classic Lolita who wants to wear something light colored, but doesn't want to appear childish at all. Something about it makes it feel like a very grown up and no-nonsense color to me.

Grey
Another no-nonsense color would be grey! Also a frequently underused color in Lolita for probably just that reason. Grey is almost always reserved for woolen winter pieces, occasionally in the spring time a paler sort of slate grey might pop up in chiffon, showing grey's less sever side. Personally, I love the versatility of grey, pair it with black for a more Gothic outfit, or white for a more Sweet outfit.

Salmon Pink
This color is pretty similar to the more commonly seen dusty rose, just a few shades darker. While dusty rose isn't an uncommon color in Classic Lolita at all, this peachy salmon pink used to be a much more common color in Sweet Lolita. I think it's an incredibly cute and demure color for Sweet Lolita! If pale olive green is the Classic Lolita's ideal choice for a cute color without looking childish, salmon pink is the Sweet Lolita's ideal choice for a more toned down color without giving up the air of childishness!

"Vivid" Pastels
Can a pastel be vivid? This is another set of colors that I tend to associate with Old School Lolita. In the early 2000's, pastels weren't always as baby-soft as they are now. Pinks were often less baby and more Barbie, and blues weren't so much sax as they were Alice. The color difference is often only a shade or two more vivid, and not an obvious difference, until you try to match it with a newer piece that you thought was the same color! I feel like these colors are saved for the ideal Old School Lolita look. Even if you have to sacrifice the waist ties to have that perfect Old School headdress to match it, because good luck finding a new one that matches it!

If there's one thing you've probably noticed about these unusually colored items, it's that many of them are from brands that are typically considered Classic Lolita brands. In fact, the only items up here that aren't from Classic Lolita brands are the "outdated" colors. For whatever reason, brands that tend to cater towards the Sweet Lolita tend to stick with the usual Lolita colors, but Classic brands are often branching out into more unusual colors. Why? I have no idea. I would speculate that it has to do with Classic Lolita being more influenced by the Victorian era than Sweet Lolita, and there simply being a larger pot of color inspiration to dip from because of that.


As usual with the LBC, I'm not the only one blogging about this topic! Check out all these other blogs that talked a little bit about unusual colors in Lolita!

Walking Billboards: The Brandwhore Print

With the release of the newest Innocent World print, there has been a little bit of commotion about something that pops up every few years or so within the Lolita community. That something is blatant advertisement on clothes, aka:
Ever since Lolita really got really big, sometime around the early to mid 2000's, prints that feature the name of the brand emblazoned across the front of their dresses has become pretty routine. The major print-releasing brands tend to release something every year or two that features their name a little larger and more attention grabbing than usual. Every custom print will feature the name of the brand in it somewhere, either nestled discreetly somewhere within the print, or integrated in a way that makes it seem like a natural part of it, especially since texts on prints in Lolita are very common, it's just the nature of branding and lets you know this is their unique design, and barring counterfeits, you're not going to be able to find it anywhere else. This isn't really a big deal for most people, but when the name gets a little too prominent, this tends to bunch a few bloomers.

 
Some of the many prints that have featured the brand's name in a place of prominence.

There are a lot of people who are very adamant about not being a walking billboard for a brand, no matter how much they enjoy the brand. It's the idea of "free advertisement" that really puts them off in most cases. I can get behind that idea in some cases. For example, I'm not going to want to walk around advertising a business that I know nothing about other than that they give out free tee shirts, or a brand of clothing that I don't care about and I'm just wearing to not be naked.

However, when it comes to brands I love, who do it creatively, I don't really see a problem with it. I see these brand's "billboard" prints as just as much of a piece of art as any other piece they might release. They feature gorgeous designs and creative art that I enjoy. I see a world of difference between this and a plain tee shirt with the name of brand printed across the front of it. Take the brand name off of a Lolita dress, and you still have an elaborately designed and decorated dress, take the brand name off of a tee shirt, and you just have a plain tee shirt. I genuinely enjoy these brands, and if anyone was interested, I would be more than happy to explain exactly where they came from and how they could get one for themselves!

I honestly have no idea if these brands are still what people wear.

There's also part of me that is still excited every time I get a piece from a brand I like, even if it's just a branded accessory. Practically no one who sees me carry it around in my day-to-day life is going to know what my tote with "Metamorphose" printed across it even means, but it pleases me to have such an iconic piece to carry around with me, and when it comes to Lolita, that's really what matters most.

I also must admit to being a bit charmed by the very names of Lolita brands, from the silly Angelic Pretty, to the secretly deviant Juliette et Justine, to the mysterious Metamorphose, to the often misspelled and somewhat incomprehensible Baby, the Stars Shine Bright. I personally get a kick at having these words and phrases, that tend to be a complete mystery to outsiders, in fancy script emblazoned across my clothes. It's almost like a secret language, or a call to any other Lolitas who might be out there in their mundane disguises. While everyone knows exactly what a shirt with the word NIKE printed across it means ("I bought this shirt at a shoe store."), only fellow Lolitas are going to know what a cupcake proclaiming "Angelic Pretty" means.

It's something I love, and something I don't have a problem with giving free advertisement to. If I didn't like it, I would have plenty of other options for things to wear, even among Lolita clothes. To fellow Lolitas, individual brand's clothes are often so unmistakable that even if the dress doesn't have the name of the brand in the print, we would know anyways. I see these pieces as the brand's artistic signature across their catalog as a whole.

What are your thoughts on these sorts of prints, or even brand's names on prints in general? Love them or loathe them? Just proclaiming your proud love of a brand, or do you feel like you're being used as a walking billboard?

Holiday Touches For Lolita Outfits

 The holidays are just around the corner and some of us are probably already heading to holiday parties, if not just trying to add some festivity to their outfits to get into the holiday spirit.
  • Pick a print with a holiday motif. This is a surefire way to add some holiday touches to your outfit, but it's also the most expensive, and the least practical if you want a very versatile closet. Many brands will have, at one point or another, released either a Christmas themed print, or a winter-themed printed.  
  • Go with jewel tones. Deep red and deep green are the iconic holiday colors, but other rich jewel tones can really set the mood for the holidays too! Jewel tones are rich, warm, colors that are perfect for this cold time of year.
  • Choose velvets, satins, or brocades. Lustrous and luxurious fabrics are a great way to add some festivity to your outfit because they often have a "party dress" feel to them. If you can't justify getting a whole dress out of a lustrous fabric, try something like a high quality satin blouse or a velvet bolero to add a bit of luster to your outfit!
  • Add some gold! This is probably the quickest and easiest way to add some holiday touches to your outfit. The best part about gold is that it can go well with most any color or style, and as a bonus, a few gold colored accessories can be picked up for a very cheap price! Try painting your nails gold to finish off the look!
  • Compliment your outfit with fur. Faux or not, fur adds a cozy wintertime look to any outfit. Anything from a fur stole, to a fur collar, to fur trim can add a little bit of winter warmth to an outfit!
  • DIY something! Head out to the craft store and pick up some holiday craft supplies! Anything from faux poinsettia, to plastic glitter snowflakes even, to cute Christmas ornaments to turn into brooches or to perch in a hairstyle can be picked up relatively cheaply and turned into something cute! 


If you're looking for some last minute touches to some holiday outfits, or even just some inspiration for something to DIY, check out this treasury!

Speaking of the holidays! The other weekend I got the chance to celebrate International Lolita Day with Ramble Rori and a ton of other great people! I got to see some familiar faces and meet some new people.
Awkward me and my fabulous bonnet. I stole this picture from Ramble Rori.
This was actually the first year I have ever gone to an ILD meetup! I usually manage to miss them, so this year was extra exciting to me. Unfortunately, I decided to leave my camera at home and the event was very dimly lit so cell phone pictures were pretty useless. Ramble Rori got a few fantastic pictures with her camera that I don't want to steal from her in case she wants to save them for a future post. We were actually adjacent to the party Victoria of Parfait Doll went to!

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