So, I've decided to write about my life with lolita fashion, but I feel it's best to begin with what came BEFORE my first meet... The thing is, I don't know exactly where to start with it... When did I decide to wear frilly dresses? When did I even want to first wear dresses in the first place? I would say about when I was 8 years old, when my younger sibling had started school and I wanted to wear their dress in the summer... But how did I get into lolita fashion?
About a year after, the big thing for us kids at the time was Pokémon. I would end up becoming a huge fan, so much so that I continued to like it well after everyone else had moved on to other things... This meant that I was bullied for still liking Pokémon, though as an autistic person, this was far from the only reason I was bullied... I still like Pokémon, though I tend to keep going in and out with it... But this effectively lead to other things.
Fast forward to when I was 15 and I got my first interest in alternative fashion. At the time I discovered emo and just thought it looked cool and that I wanted to dress that way... Soon after I joined a website relating to anime and manga, where people often shared pictures, not just of anime and manga characters and cosplayers, but other things relating to Japan, including music and alternative fashion. It would have been around this time I would have first seen what would have been old-school lolita fashion, though as a heavily-bullied autistic AMAB person, there was no way I would have any interest in it... I also saw pictures of visual kei bands, which definitely influenced my style, so instead of being all-out emo, my fashion sense was probably closer to VK, even though I never really did VK hair or make-up...
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| This pic from 2007 is probably the nearest I ever got to having a Visual Kei hairstyle... |
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| This is one of my fave pics of myself and dates from July 2008... |
At the time of the second pic, I had actually started to play around with androgyny and gender presentation... I was no longer as badly bullied as a couple of years earlier and felt more free to experiment with more feminine looks... However, I wasn't yet into lolita fashion...
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| I think this was a couple of month before the previous pic, and whilst not full on cross-dressing, I think this looks quite cute! |
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| From around the same time, an attempt at being a pirate... This is foreshadowing what was to come... |
Even though I knew about cosplay, I only started doing it a couple of years after this... My first meet was just before I turned 20, in my nearest large city... And yes, this is relevant to me getting into lolita fashion!
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| Me at my first cosplay meet, October 2010... |
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| An early cosplay from April 2011 that feels like it's foreshadowing me wearing ouji... |
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| Sometimes I'd mix cosplay with alternative fashion, as seen here in November 2011... |
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| Me doing a casual Mikuo cosplay, literally the day after the previous pic... I think this is my fave of these early cosplays... |
So how does cosplay factor into me getting into lolita fashion? Well, considering all of the above it was only a matter of time, in fact I was already interested in it at the time of the two last photos! I went to a cosplay meet in July 2011 and there was a cosplayer that had just been on holiday to Japan, but instead of cosplaying to the meet, she decided she wanted to wear her lolita clothes she'd recently bought... This led to me and a few others getting interested in the fashion... She was wearing a black and white stripy bittersweet co-ord from memory, and may or may not have been wearing Sugary Carnival... Either that or a Bodyline dress... I can't remember...
Anyway, at first I thought this was some sort of cosplay, but she showed me that it was actually an alternative fashion style... (Though I really should've already known this...) In the 5 years since I first saw it, I'd got into Death Note, and I knew the character Misa Amane wore lolita, so I thought 'OK, I should put together an outfit that she might wear'...
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| Erm... This isn't lolita! It's a nice goth outfit, but not lolita! |
In true ita fashion, I just made use of what I already had, though the bow I bought on the same day as the Mikuo photo above, which was only a week before this... My legs were absolutely freezing, and it's unusual for me to even show that much leg anyway! This is so unlolita, that I don't even count it as my first co-ord! The skirt was one I bought in 2009 and was the first skirt I ever owned... Those boots were a birthday present in 2006, and lasted until 2018!
I look at that now and wonder if I'd even done any research on the fashion... If not, I must've done some in the next couple of months before I attended my first lolita meet... Not that that prevented me from being an ita of course, it was the early 2010's after all... But that's basically my origin story done, so next will be about me attending my first meet and joining the community...
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