why lolita?

If I had to try and describe lolita as briefly as possible to you, I would have to start with a sentiment shared by most alternative fashion subcultures: at the end of the day, it’s about doing whatever you want.

Accordingly, I will always associate it with misfits.

Lolita is a Japanese street fashion whose origins can be traced all the way back to the 90's, even 80's if one is being generous. Brands like PINK HOUSE (founded by designer Isao Kaneko), the defunct Atsuki Onishi, and MILK, founded in the heart of Harajuku's shopping district in the late 1970s, are seen as the predecessors of the quintessential lolita style eventually popularized in the 1990s. From there onwards, brands such as BABY, THE STARS SHINE BRIGHT (henceforth BABY), Angelic Pretty, Metamorphose, and Innocent World, would all continue to bear the torch into the present day—and this is only talking about Japanese brands. Overseas lolita brands, particularly in China, are as prevalent and active as ever.

Its stylistic fingerprint seems to be made of influences plucked from other times and other places at will. In a lolita's outfit you may find hints of Victoriana in the dramatic flared dresses and opulent corsages. You may instead find the tartan-printed edginess of Vivienne Westwood, or the black-and-white striped socks so emblematic of Alice in Wonderland. You may find the canotiers, cotton yokes, and layered fabrics of America's Gunne Sax, which itself drew from Victorian and Edwardian inspirations.

So, it is no surprise that at first glance lolitas look like girls fallen out of another time, or another world entirely. But this allows for the charming moments where they reveal themselves to be products of their times. I will always associate lolita fashion with its domestic peak in the 1990s and early 2000s: visible film grain on magazine paper, scenes of Jingūbashi1 from the early aughts, the clunky ugly-cuteness of camcorders, digicams, and flip phones, quaint personal blogs and diaries typed out into the void, tiny apartments containing tinier closets filled to bursting with petticoats2—a piece of clothing so dated and irrelevant, by the way, that many people confuse it for an actual type of coat.

In Butterflies on Display, Megan Catherine Rose borrows a concept from Roland Barthes when she describes photos of lolitas as a punctum, a captured moment shooting out like an arrow…[that] pierces us.3

Indeed, something about the frumpy defiance of the girls in the street snaps pokes at my heart. Their awkward pigeon toed stances, their killer eye-contact framed by dour expressions, their implicit demand: “take me seriously!” while wearing literal yards of lace and clutching teddy bear pochettes… there is not a hint of irony, humor, or self-deprecation in the way they hold themselves.

It is no wonder that these girls remain the primary inspiration for many lolitas around the world, decades after their photos were taken.

Everything that should’ve repelled me—all the baggage attached to the name of the fashion, their questionable reputation in Japan as homely, mentally ill misfits, and most fundamentally, the indulgent outlandishness of their clothes—instead drew me in. Maybe that says more about me than anything about them.

For many years, lolita remained just another Japanese pop-cultural oddity at the back of my mind. Then I befriended a math student living in Rostov. Yes, the main reason why I ever felt like I could wear a Japanese fashion from the 90s was because of a Russian girl, 5000 miles removed from North Carolina.

We still discuss lolita fashion, namely the deals she or I have managed to find on secondhand websites, the mandatory “dream dress(es)”, coordinate4 inspirations, etc… I still remember her posting about her first “brand” dress. She uploads some of her coords and handmade clothes onto her personal website. Her style and our discussions remain the strongest influence on my taste. Спасибо, Соня.

What appeals to me about lolita? Sure, the overall cuteness is important, but like I said before, the quality I find most striking is the un-abashment of the girls and women who wear it. The sincere enthusiasm that goes beyond their clothes, coloring their lifestyle and everyday routines.

Their way of life even bleeds into the way they speak. The gentler, articulate Joseigo (lit. women's language) was at some point co-opted and revived by lolitas, who dubbed it shukujo no kotoba (lit. lady's speech). Manners were held in high regard, even formalized by guidelines in a popular lolita magazine, Gothic and Lolita Bible.5

Ensconced in jargon and further enveloped by the strange, anachronistic register of shukujo no kotoba, lolitas were able to create yet more distance between themselves and normalcy. Rather than being constrained by these stricter mores, some lolitas seemed to find them fulfilling and affirming.

On the other hand, my Russian friend is a little more utilitarian: she once said that she could have fixated on anything other than lolita, that there is nothing deeper binding her to it. It could’ve been any other style.

I’d like to be as pragmatic as she is, but I know that this is impossible for someone like me.

I found lolita at a time where many of its participants were looking to the past. Old-school lolita is a purposefully-ambiguous blanket term that attempts to capture the sweet lolita style popular in the late 90s and early aughts in Japan, exemplified by sartorial details like the use of broadcloth cotton over polyester blends, the use of thicker and more textured material such as velvet, jacquard, and gobelin, and the use of embroidery and appliques over prints. Thus, old-school (sweet) lolita tends to look simpler than the maximalist iteration of lolita that garnered the most Western exposure in the 2010s, so-called over-the-top sweet lolita (abbreviated to OTT sweet).

Whether through an overexposure to OTT sweet, or influenced by the general rise in interest in the early 2000's among a generation of young adults scarcely old enough to have significant memories of it—though it was likely a mix of all these factors, and more—old-school lolita became a perennial talking point among lolitas online. What counted as old-school sweet? Surely, it was not as simple as a hardline boundary that one could slap on a certain year. And why were we so enthralled by it when only a few years earlier, old-school was often overlooked as being frumpy, unflattering, and outdated?

My allegiance towards the girls in the street snaps aligns me with old-school. I have a handful of pieces from the early 2000s and even the 1990s; it speaks to the quality of construction back then that they have all stood the test of time. But I can't help but wonder if the ceaseless cultural churn will have us one day scorning old-school again, as we are constantly either on the search for something new, or in the process of resurrecting bygones in the name of nostalgia for a time we weren't around for.

The undisputed queen of lolita-related IP is likely the movie adaptation of Kamikaze Girls, which exposed lolita to an international audience upon its debut at the 57th Cannes Film Festival.

The original novel by Novala Takemoto, titled Shimotsuma Monogatari after the prefecture in which most of the events take place, is also popular overseas.

Kamikaze Girls enjoyed critical and commercial success. The lolita brand that featured heavily in the movie, BABY, became the quintessential lolita brand—and the dress worn by the protagonist, simply dubbed Momoko’s dress, is instantly recognizable to lolitas all over the world, old-school or no.

There are moments of real struggle and seriousness, but for the most part the movie is buoyed by whimsy and humor. It’s colorful in every sense of the word. The main relationship is a platonic one, between a Rococophile lolita and a tough Yankī biker girl.

On the second-place rung of lolita fiction is Kamikaze Girls’ unpleasant and abrasive cousin, directed by Tsuchiya Yutaka, Peep ‘TV’ Show.

Our 18-year old NEET protagonist, Moe (Shiori Gechov), is undoubtedly cute, though she tries her hardest to muddy the waters. Moe is clad from head-to-toe in BABY, but it is difficult to imagine their staff being as enthused with the kind of representation that Peep ‘TV’ Show offers. Her defining features are: her chapatsu hair, which she wears down, a headdress, a BABY one-piece, and an unrelenting, indiscriminate sense of misanthropy.

I’m not sure if she ever smiles once in the movie’s hour-and-a-half runtime.

She does a lot of other things, though, including but not limited to:

In the last scene of the movie, she and her “partner-in-crime” sit on the floor of their studio with their backs to a wall and stare down the camera, as footage of the 9-11 terrorist attacks is projected onto their faces. The movie cuts from her dead-eyed stare to a caption that reads: “this is our ground zero” (orig. 「ここが、ボクたちのグラウンド・ゼロ」).6 While hundreds of civilians were dying in the flames and rubble of the Twin Towers, Moe and her compatriot were affixed to the TV, beer in hand:

One review for Peep ‘TV’ Show says: “Japan was so ahead of its time in figuring out the computer was going to make people fucked up and weird.”7

But really, what better choice of subculture was there to feature in this movie about the atomization of modern Japanese citizens and their comically doomed, perverted attempts at finding human connection via an online peep show? What other subculture comes with this brand of female-centric, terminally-online neuroticism—at its worst cruel, antisocial, and exclusive, and at its best an earnest, creative, and frankly beautiful mode of escapism?

Some brands are deified, especially the two forerunners: BABY and Angelic Pretty. But don't be fooled: there is no such thing as a “big” lolita brand. Lolita as a whole is alive and well, but it is still a niche of a niche, and it will never be the early 2000’s, or early 2010’s, ever again.

The Gothic & Lolita Bible has been out of print since 2018.8

Rufflecon, the largest lolita convention in the United States, had its final iteration in 2017.9

Outside of Japan and online, lolitas once congregated on LiveJournal, but their presence on the platform has been effectively erased following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Victorian Maiden is one of many brands that have closed their physical stores.10

The brands that still exist, like Angelic Pretty, have drifted away from their initial sweet lolita style, instead favoring trendier, less lolita-like construction and materials.

Mary Magdalene, a relatively well-known classic lolita brand, employs only two people, and is hanging onto existence by a thread.11

Despite all of this and more, lolita is arguably one of the longest-lived subcultures of the Japanese alternative fashion scene. Could anyone on the streets of 1990’s Japan have ever guessed that lolita—by all accounts what seemed like a strange, transient fad—would not only survive, but thrive in multiple continents, well into the 2020’s?

Another thing that appeals to me about lolita is its celebration of cuteness and femininity, extending conveniently to a celebration of women.

One of my favorite indie game developers is a lesbian gothic lolita. Two of her visual novels, RehAIbilitation12 (her first), and What Is It Like To Taste13, feature gay lolita main characters. They are, or once were, girls out of joint with their surrounding world. Sometimes they are helpless and out of reach, other times they are assertive and no-nonsense.

They are damaged and in turn they can’t help but damage others. They love frills, lace, and other women.

What is the most immediate thing that sets them apart from their compatriots? Of course, their headdresses, platform shoes, and petticoats.

It couldn’t have been any other way.

footnotes

works cited