Yes. This is a true story.
8 years down the road, and not everyone who was in the club are together now, but the name 'Les Lolita' is still remembered as a fond and nostalgic folly of our beginning days in these fashion.
8 years ago, Gothic Lolita fashion was rather different than what is popularly recognised now:
There's even a phrase for this style among the lolita community now - oldskool.
When I flipped through the early Gothic Lolita Bibles, these images were what we, back then, aspired to emulate as best we could with tailored dresses and our homemade headdresses. Brands with incomprehensible but still delightfully exotic names, Metamorphose temps de fille, Baby the Stars Shine Bright, Victorian Maiden, were almost unattainable unless you had funds to travel to Japan and then more funds to buy them directly from the stores.
This was also the period when we used to discuss how does one pronounce Moi-même-Moitié correctly?
8 years later, the basic shape and form of a lolita dress remains more or less unchanged but lolitas are no longer afraid of mixing bright, bright colours and international shipping or shopping services are now readily available to the masses.
The pitifully few examples I've highlighted above are just the tip of the iceberg. Thinking back, on the second last day of the year and the decade, it's really quite amazing just how Gothic Lolita fashion has evolved within 10 years.
For me? I think lolita fashion has never been as exciting as it is now. This is what draws me back despite being in my 30s, and insidiously morphing from a size 10-12 to 12-14, with more gray hairs popping out with a vengence, and just regularly feeling too old among a crowd of ever-younger new lolitas bursting onto the scene.
From the early style of monochromatic black and whites or solids to the kaleidoscope of candy colours, wigs, prints, sub-genres within a genre, gothic lolita fashion just keeps pulling me back in.
Yours truly. Then and Now.
2002-2010 - A Loli Odyssey
