Lolita 52 Challenge: How I first found out about lolita.

By the time this posts on my blog, I'll probably be half-way through my three-day drive across the country back home. My blog will definitely be more active once I have some time to sit down in my apartment, but I feel like until March my life is just going to be way too busy. Just to keep my blog active, here comes the next entry in my 52 Week Lolita Challenge!

10. How I first found out about Lolita.

A lot of the details surrounding what happened when I first got into Lolita fashion 5-6 years ago is already fuzzy, and it doesn’t help that I found out about the fashion a good three years before I actually took the plunge and started purchasing pieces for my wardrobe. All I remember is that when I was 13 years old, and a freshman in high school, I had met a close friend of mine who introduced me to Japanese street fashions in general. Both of us had met at an anime convention (you could bet I was in my full-fledged fangirl phase—it’s a little embarrassing thinking back on it), and I wasn’t too big on dressing myself well or really just caring about my appearance in general.

My friend used to dress in Visual-kei type fashion back in the day (she’s graduated to largely 80’s grunge), but when she showed me some photos of her favourite bands, members wearing big cupcake-dresses with lots of frills and lace immediately caught my attention. I grew up watching Cardcaptor Sakura, and pretty much every aspect of my life was directly influenced by the show, and I always wanted to wear Sakura’s beautiful dresses that Tomoyo lovingly made for her, but could never find anything like it in the store. I even designed a couple of my own dresses that I had seamstresses make for me when I was in middle school which were really quite nice too! I only had a few select dresses handmade by some aunties that fit the aesthetic, and I literally wore them to pieces. I started to do more research, a friend later showed me Fan+Friend, and the rest was history!

I think my initial influence from Cardcaptor Sakura is a big reason why I'm so big into "anime-kei" now and always love to mix in some Magical Girl influences into most (if not all) my outfits.

Of course I had a pretty terrible ita failure somewhere in between, but I was dead set on wearing shiro Lolita, since to this day I’m not a huge fan of how pink looks on me (at least the straight pastel pink normally used), never liked any shade of blue, and wanted to control my spending by only buying things in my two favourite colours; white and lavender. Back then lavender wasn’t a very popular colour in the fashion (that has, of course, changed), so I settled on just straight shiro.

Since then my style has fluctuated and changed and I'm still trying to put together that perfect coordinate that really embraces all the things I love about fashion into one big ball! I love pastels, but I also love Cult Party kind of silhouettes and fabrics, but not straight sweet lolita... Who knows what I like.

These two coordinates are probably the closest I've gotten to that perfect sweet spot!

What are your stories about coming into the fashion? Was Lolita the first Japanese fashion you were interested in, or were you introduced through another fashion?

Previous entries:

14. Lolitas I would love to meet.
20. How satisfied I am with my current wardrobe.
26. How I get out of a wardrobe slump.