Hey folks! We are moving off of Substack and onto Buttondown. With the recent news that Substack cuts big deals with anti-trans bigots, we cannot monetize our blog/email list to fundraise for Royal Vegas Retreat on this platform. All of our existing subscribers have automatically been moved over - so await our next post from Buttondown at the usual time - Friday April 9th at 4:20 PM PT.
They Can't All Be Winners
The case for experimenting with your wardrobe and not always loving your coords
Hey folks! I hope you’re all hanging in there. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the long, dark winter feels like it’s going to be over soon. And we’re hearing that some of you may even be vaccinated already! Is it too soon to dream of our shared vacation in the desert? We’re still cautiously optimistic.
This week in our validating content for newcomers series, I’m here to talk about, well, coords I made and didn’t like! Real clunkers, honestly!
One cool thing about COVID, if we can really look for an upside in a tragedy that continues to claim countless lives, is virtual meets. I will admit that at first, I wasn’t really about them. It is difficult to socialize in a huge group over Zoom. However, as comms moved to Discord (good choice! Much better software!) and refined the format of virtual tea parties, I’ve started to see what’s so great about them.
For starters, going to a virtual meet gives you a bit of extra time to get ready. When you’re going to an in-person meet, you have to factor in travel time. And if you’re like me, and you don’t always plan ahead, you might turn up looking a little…sweaty. Or scruffy. Or harried. Which doesn’t make you or me any less of a Lolita, but feeling like I look scruffy isn’t fun to me.
Better yet, if you’re going to meet with people via video chat, you only actually need to be dressed from the waist up. While I love putting together a whole coordinate, the proliferation of the “mullet coord” (business on top, party on the bottom) is a good thing. Newcomers without a complete wardrobe can participate just as fully as anyone else, even if they’re still waiting for their petticoat to arrive in the mail. Even if you’re wearing a full coord in the snap you take for Instagram, you can do like several of us did at Royal Vegas Online and wear a nice fuzzy pair of slippers with your coord.
Given all of this, plus the ability to meet up with comms outside of our immediate geographic location, virtual meets are a win for the greater community! I also argue that they provide a low-stakes environment for experimenting with your wardrobe.
I love having an eclectic wardrobe that encompasses many substyles and allows me to jump on the bandwagon of the latest trends. Seeing others’ coordinates and saying, “I want to wear that, too!” is one of my favorite experiences in participating in the Lolita fashion community. I love feeling personally inspired by what others’ are wearing. When leopard print trended tuff a couple of years ago, you can bet I hopped on that train. I don’t have any actual nostalgia for old school, having started wearing the fashion seriously around 2015, but the old school revival of late has captured my heart.
So I love to experiment with my wardrobe! And that sometimes means putting together a coordinate that I ultimately don’t love when I look at it in retrospect.
“Progress” or growth in Lolita fashion, whatever that means to you, isn’t necessarily a straight line. It’s normal and even great to take two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back. By leaving room for experimentation and coords that I don’t love, I leave room for me in my fashion. “Leaving room for me” means leaving room for me to have had a crummy mood episode that day, to have been annoyed with work, to not pay attention to my makeup look, or to wear what I want because I feel like it, without caring about what others think. It also goes hand in hand with loving others’ coords as they are, and unwiring the learned impulse to nitpick and scrutinize - because we don’t need to do that to participate in Lolita fashion!
Our fashion is rebellion, and to me, that means the rules are just guidelines. A starting point for personal expression. And if that is true, who says coords have to look a certain way all the time? What is stopping any of us from experimenting? Slapping disparate substyles together, pulling in colors outside of the main piece, or even infusing a coord with another alternative fashion style?
I’d even argue that experimentation is necessary to keep growing Lolita fashion. And with experimentation comes hypotheses that you’ll ultimately prove wrong, like “Sugar Hearts will look great with all-black supporting pieces,” or “this gothy peignoir and underskirt together will go with any sweet piece.” And others may look at these supposedly failed hypotheses and say “actually, this works for me,” because our experience of the fashion and what makes a “good” coord is subjective (and subject to implicit bias).
So go forth and make some coords you don’t love! It’s part of the process. And maybe in the future, you’ll see past the stuff that didn’t seem to work and take another stab at the concept. Your fashion and your aesthetic are for you, and that means you get to define your own success, too.
What Else We Loved This Week
After retrospecting on shopping habits, it feels great to revisit Kimbuucha’s video on budgeting and saving money for Lolita fashion.
R. R. Memorandum’s blog post on Reclaiming Opulence really resonated! Give it a read~
As before, please hold tight until May 2021 for updates on Royal Vegas Retreat 2021. With the latest bulletins from the federal government about widespread vaccine availability starting in May, we’re feeling cautiously optimistic - with “cautious” being the operative word, as vaccine supply is only one part of this complex scenario. If you recently signed up to volunteer with us - THANK YOU! And thank you especially for your patience as we get organized.
Stay safe, keep wearing a mask, and stay home when possible. As always, you can check https://prettyprincess.club for information on Royal Vegas Retreat 2021.
Before we get started, we’d like to draw your attention to the organization Red Canary Song which provides advocacy and mutual aid for the intersection of Asian migrant and sex worker communities. If you have the ability to donate them, or to individuals who were affected by the mass shooting in Atlanta this week, we encourage you to do so.
Content note: this post mentions shopping, addiction, alcoholism, cigarette smoking, and elitism.
Hey folks! Happy Friday. Nif here once again with some Validating Content for Newcomers that I hope will resonate with seasoned and novice fashionistas alike.
I think there's a lot to unpack about the importance of shopping in the Lolita fashion hobby. On its face, the role of shopping seems pretty obvious: we have to buy clothes to participate. The clothes, for the most part, are more expensive than everyday fast fashion, but they're higher-quality and don't wear out quickly. You can generally expect a main piece to last you as long as it suits your tastes. And better yet, we have a secondhand market that allows us to take advantage of the quality of these pieces. So that's great, right?
In a vacuum, this seems alright. Building a wardrobe is a bit of an investment, sure, but you have options even if your budget is constrained. Unfortunately, shopping is complicated, to say the least.
On secondhand sites that allow you to buy directly from another individual, you might encounter sellers who seem to buy dresses just for the sake of reselling them. I am not an economist, but shrinking the pool of dresses available from a retail store for a release only to sell those dresses at a profit seems... bad.
And not only is it unkind to manipulate supply and demand in our niche fashion for your personal gain (where our fashion is so niche that a significantly powerful individual's action will send waves through the community for weeks or months), but it sets a crappy precedent - that sellers should demand prices higher than retail.
Between this, the relative scarcity of extended sizes - especially with older pieces - and the culture of conspicuous consumption that encourages us to share our "hauls" (leaving aside that shopping may be one of the few joyful things you have in your life right now, in the year of our COVID 2021), shopping is complicated. Furthermore, folks like Cora Maria, Avina-Kei, Manon Marguerite, and Tsumikko with Kawaii Riot have talked about the connections between kawaii fashion and climate justice at length - I strongly encourage you to listen to what they have to say to learn more about sustainability and our consumption!
For myself, I have struggled with shopping (and other) addiction off and on throughout my life, even before getting into the fashion. Learning how to buy just one thing at a time is frankly something I'm still working on! Occasionally I get swept up into the frenzy of sales and new releases and buy something I didn't actually want, or spent beyond what I'd planned.
...and that's okay!
There are certain models of addiction treatment, think AA, that assume that an addict is completely incapable of engaging with the subject of their addiction in a responsible way. Sometimes, on an individual level, in specific circumstances, this line of thought makes sense: smoking cigarettes, for example, is an all-or-nothing prospect for me, given just how addictive and readily available they are. (Damn I can't believe I quit! Please clap!) Alcohol, on the other hand, is something I've learned to engage with in moderation. I can have just 1 or 2 drinks once a week. I can actually keep alcohol in my house! I can choose to party once or twice a year and not make a habit of it. And that's really cool!
Shopping is still something I struggle with. It turns out that I have to buy things to survive, like, you know, groceries. And as it also turns out, it's fun to grow my wardrobe and buy new things. I love to follow trends and be influenced by others' styles. And sometimes I know I want something, but I'm not sure what specifically.
Such was the case with this particular impulse buy - the medium-length Rejeana JSK by Meta. It came up on Lacemarket one day, and I took notice - I happened to know the seller, and apparently that convinced me that Rejeana was the dress for me. I had been looking for the "perfect" bordeaux dress for a minute. I knew I wanted more Meta in my wardrobe. And a non-print dress. And, could it be velvet too? So when my comm buddy Lexi popped this listing up - at a very reasonable price, I might add - I went for it.
Almost immediately afterwards, I was consumed with regret. Did I need this dress? When was I going to wear it? I spent a non-trivial amount of time beating myself up over it. What had I done, when I was trying to be so responsible and get my finances together?
Here's where the story gets good. Buying this dress and arranging for local pickup got me an invite to seller Lexi's KISS-mas party. Yes - the band, KISS, and also Christmas. I'll admit - I'm actually not much of a KISS fan? But I'm always down for an aesthetic challenge! I dressed up in Lolita fashion and went for a low-maintenance look - sort of a "groupie" vibe. I was terribly impressed by just how many attendees went for the full face paint.
So that was great. Buying this dress was an excuse to hang out with some very cool people, and I enjoyed some frank chats with my new-ish bud Lexi. I got the dress, took it home, and planned when I'd wear it.
I ended up wearing it only a couple weeks later on a trip to Vegas with my "cool dude friends" (we went to play pinball and take in the sights and just spend some chill time together before the holidays! Highly recommend). I leaned in to the versatility a non-print dress affords and pulled in some black for an "Alice in Wonderland" vibe.
My wardrobe is just extensive enough that I make an effort to try and wear each dress at least once a year. Usually that means waiting a bit of time before wearing a dress again. But just a couple of months later, I found myself reaching for Rejeana again for a Valentine's Day date with my partner, Ryan.
The weather got warmer, I found myself seeking out pastels and summery vibes, and ultimately any efforts to dress up with friends were stymied by the pandemic. Once it was clear that Royal Vegas Retreat was not happening in 2020, I stopped dressing up for a few months.
With the help of the incredible people at JFashion on Demand and Bay Area Kei, we put on Royal Vegas Online, and Rejeana burst forth from my closet once again. I went for sort of an angelic or nun-like look, I guess - not my usual but fun anyway. She goes on easy and wears comfy, so she was an obvious choice for Sunday of RVO.
Barely a month later, Ryan and I masked up for a little jaunt around town to see some holiday lights and deliver Christmas presents to his family. Red velvet Rejeana somehow was the obvious choice. By now I had plenty of bordeaux to go with her - a coat, a beret, shoes - and it was the easiest thing to just throw together a festive coord that's comfy enough to wear in the car.
Somehow I wore this dress that I owned for just over a year 4 times already. In retrospect, the pangs of regret I felt after hitting "Buy It Now" were totally unfounded - Rejeana is my wardrobe's secret MVP. Even though she's an outlier among the prints, she fits right in by filling a specific niche, and I keep finding reasons to wear this dress over and over again.
All of the conventional wisdom about wardrobes - to start small, don't compete with others, think carefully about which substyle you like best, build a capsule wardrobe, etc. - is still legit. But I'm here to say that if you can't or won't follow that advice for any reason? Allow yourself to be surprised.
It's okay to not know what you want. It's okay to buy something without thinking very hard about it. It's okay to feel like you screwed up by buying something! But it's not the end of the world. In fact, you may have just made your best wardrobe decision yet.
What Else We Loved this Week
New virtual events!!! Mark your calendars now for Mystical Tea Garden by Rosé Forêt, Ursa Major^2 by Bay Area Kei, and Purgatorio by Paradiso and JFashion on Demand.
The new Dogs and Desserts print by our pal Puvithel (a collab with Cottonbook and A Gato Designs) is an adorable departure from Puvi’s typical designs, but every bit as bold and creative. Gorgeous!
As before, please hold tight until May 2021 for updates on Royal Vegas Retreat 2021. With the latest bulletins from the federal government about widespread vaccine availability starting in May, we’re feeling cautiously optimistic - with “cautious” being the operative word, as vaccine supply is only one part of this complex scenario. If you recently signed up to volunteer with us - THANK YOU! And thank you especially for your patience as we get organized.
Stay safe, keep wearing a mask, and stay home when possible. As always, you can check https://prettyprincess.club for information on Royal Vegas Retreat 2021.
Hey everyone! Welcome to our newest content series, unofficially titled "Validating Content for Newcomers." For the next several weeks, we're going to focus on new Lolitas and J-fashionistas, and how the Lolita fashion community can welcome them in with open arms.
Every so often, I happen to notice a post - on Rufflechat, or elsewhere on Facebook, or wherever - that asks if our fashion is dying. I really hate using Facebook, to be honest, so I only happen to notice because Facebook has notified me about something else. In a moment of weakness, I start to scroll, and then realizing where I am, I close the app in disgust. But sometimes, I see that post - "Is Lolita Fashion Dying????????"
From the perspective of the brands we cherish, this is a reasonable question to ask. Our beloved fashion houses might endure much more financial hardship than a major label, or a brand who caters to mainstream fashion desires, or even a bigger, less niche alternative fashion brand. Given their costs, are they able to charge enough for their pieces? Are enough people buying? Do they have the social media reach they need, or are they being beaten down by the (racist, status-quo-preserving) algorithm?
What if the brand owner is disabled or chronically ill, and they need to step away? What will happen when they come back to their brand? What if the brand owner lives in the US and has insurmountable medical costs? Will their fans chip in to help them? What if they are mentally ill, and they need to change their engagement model, their sales volume, or something else to help them feel human?
These are all questions worth worrying about, in my humble opinion. But the Post in question, with its panicked tone, isn't generally wondering about the health and safety of J-fashion brand owners. The Post wonders something a little more insidious.
It wonders things like:
Has the fashion become saturated with people who engage in it too casually?
Has the fashion become too mainstream?
Does the fashion no longer prioritize people who are thin, cisgender, and racially-privileged?
Has the culture around our fashion changed so much that it no longer resembles the thing I was so eager to join 10, 15, or 20 years ago?
Is the fashion no longer exclusive to me and my friends? Do we really have to share?
All of these things - the ability to engage casually, the greater visibility, the increased diversity, etc. - are good for our fashion. The more people we attract to Lolita fashion, the better, because that means more people buying pieces, more pieces in the secondhand market, more people buying tickets to events, more people available to plan events, bigger comms with more meetups, more friends, and more fun. What could be better?
Of course, as we grow, we do run the risk of attracting a bad element. But frankly, I am not worried about sexual predators in our community. The Lolita fashion community generally does an exceptionally good job of identifying genuine creeps and making them feel unwelcome.
I am worried about attracting bigots. People who get caught up in the drama and use it as an excuse to be hateful. People who deliberately conflate trans women engaging in good faith with "sissies." People who lash out at Black, Indigenous, and Latine/x Lolitas as "cultural appropriators." People who call fat and plus-sized Lolitas "entitled" for wishing that major brands made dresses in their sizes.
I posit that our fashion is actually stronger than ever. While brands will come and go, and we may miss them dearly (RIP Putumayo, we'll always have the cat-ear coat I bought at Rufflecon), more designers, inventors, and mavericks are waiting in the wings to take their place. While major events may fold, there are those of us who will recreate them bigger and better than ever. And for everyone who leaves the fashion, 2 more are asking - so, where do I buy these clothes?
With all this in mind, what can we do to keep our community growing? Once life is back to normal, and we're having in-person meetups again, we will notice a whole cohort of folks who have never been to a meetup in person. The people who were fascinated by Lolita fashion for years and decided, finally, to engage in earnest during the pandemic. And when you walk around your town with your newer, cooler crew, even more people will take notice, and ask themselves: "What's stopping me from joining them? What's keeping me from dressing like that?" So what can you do to welcome them in?
Stop dunking on newbies.
Yes, we know - nobody uses Facebook's search feature correctly. Sometimes people rehash conversations that have happened just about every month since the genesis of Lolita fashion, on whichever platform is in vogue at the time. Here's a thought - you don't have to engage with that post. You can leave it to the moderators of a group to handle within their rules, and you can ignore it. Going out of your way to mock an uninformed comment for your personal amusement no doubt feels awful for the person (an actual human being!!!) being dunked on. And each time you do that - especially when you don't give constructive advice, like "here is where this question has been asked before," or "here is how we prefer to handle questions like this in this group" - you shoo one more eager newbie away.
Stop referring people to 4chan. (and stop posting!)
Yeah, I know, you read it "for the articles." But 4chan's politics, broadly speaking, don't align at all with the community's values, including those as fundamental as "protect abuse survivors" and "oust predators." It's also a hotbed for the worst kinds of thinking in our community - particularly racism, trans hatred, and fat hatred. Every time you tell someone 4chan is a "good resource" for the fashion, you're also telling them "actually, all these bigoted comments? Those DO align with what our community believes, so get used to it!"
And yes, as a former gull myself, I know you're "just scrolling," and I know how upset it makes you when you see someone trashing your hard work - your meticulously-constructed coord, or your meetup that took literal months of planning. It sucks when people acting in bad faith try to divide your comm! So stop giving the trolls the time of day. Don't open the site. Don't scroll. Remove it from your life, and see how much happier it makes you. Avina-kei's post for Kawaii Riot is absolutely required reading if you're not yet convinced.
Call out bigotry in the moment.
This one goes without saying - if someone says something overtly hateful, at a meetup or online, tell them to stop. If you think they're receptive to changing their behavior, call them in in a private channel. If not? Call them out publicly and send the message that this isn't acceptable in our community.
Make your meetups accessible.
Another one that feels pretty obvious. Are you holding meetups at ADA-accessible venues (which are often at a very low bar of physical access)? Can you warn people up front about access issues at a given venue? If food is involved, will people with dietary restrictions be able to eat a full meal or otherwise participate to the same degree as someone without a dietary restriction?
Reframe your thinking about others' coords.
Why do you feel compelled to leave "concrit" (yes, absolutely in scare quotes) when fashionistas share their coords? Why do you feel the need to nitpick which genre of alternative fashion the coord sits in? Why does it matter? Does their coord hurt you by existing?
While writing this post, I found myself thinking about Jacques Noël Manuel's video about critique and Sartre's notion of bad faith. Definitely give this video a watch!
Price your secondhand sales fairly.
Don’t send the message that newbies should expect to shell out for their first dress. We know that there are affordable secondhand options out there - so be one of them! Don’t buy dresses for the sake of reselling them, and be generous; your change in tastes is someone else’s inroad into the fashion.
Final thoughts:
If reading this post made you feel a little defensive - maybe you've been a jerk to a newbie before, or overstepped a boundary, or let bigotry slide in your circle - that's okay! It is good to grow and change. I encourage you to sit with this feeling, and rather than lashing out, let it percolate and think about what you're going to do moving forward.
What else we loved this week
Are you caught up on Marinakei’s Frill Talk: Listen to Real Voices podcast series on YouTube? Don’t miss the latest episodes with the glamorous (PPC staffer!) Kimbuucha and the illustrious Jade.
And did you know that Jade is coming out with not one but 2 collections of poetry this year? Check out her promo video and subscribe to her email list for updates.
As always, you can check prettyprincess.club to learn more about our flagship event, Royal Vegas Retreat 2021. Stay tuned for updates on our event starting in May. As in 2020, we are prepared to postpone if it isn’t yet safe to hold our event in person.
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