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lolitav · 3 years

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Hello! I’m pretty new to Lolita fashion, and I was curious if you’d have any suggestions for what would be good for a beginner just starting out to wear? I only ever find big brands when I look for Lolita online, and I’m just not sure if I’m ready to spend $500 on a single whole outfit yet (this might be because I’m plus-sized though)

I’m assuming you are asking this because you’ve done research on your own and would like my specific opinion about this. If you haven’t done your own research, I’d recommend that you do that. I really like answering questions like this. However, the general community has a policy that, in the livejournal days, was summed up as “READ THE DARN MEMORIES BEFORE YOU MAKE YOUR FIRST POST” and now, in the facebook days, has refined itself into, “Try using the search function; someone asks this pretty much every day.”

That’s not to say that people don’t want to help. I love helping, and the big sisters in Big Sisters of Lolita Fashion group on facebook are in that group specifically to help. However, a lot of people get tired of answering questions that there’s already resources about.

Again, though, I really don’t mind. (Slightly selfish motivation: when I write resources that appeal to a lot of people who are interested in the fashion, it really boosts the blog. I don’t make money on this blog but I do get enjoyment out of watching my follower count slowly approach 2000). Just be aware that there’s pretty good beginner guides out there, and my opinions don’t reflect the entire community at large.

So let’s jump in to 20dollarlolita’s guide to doing your first look for a budget:

Generally, the dress/skirt will be the most expensive part of your first coord. The petticoat might be an exception to this, but I’ll save that for the second point.

Some dresses are $300. Some dresses are $30. Here’s the point where you have the potential to save the most. The secret is to find an inexpensive dress that still holds up to lolita standards.

Part number 1, your single most important focus when buying inexpensively is to not buy a replica. Anyone selling replicas at very low prices is selling you a really badly made replica. I bought several just to prove a point and they were all absolutely awful (though I’ve gotten a ton of jokes out of that $14 Mary Magdalene replica). Make sure that the listing has multiple angles and images of a dress, and that it doesn’t look like stolen pictures. Check their other listings and see if they have a consistent way of photographing, or if it looks like each of their products was photographed in a different place and by different people and with different models.

A lot of dresses on Taobao (which is sort of China’s eBay) are much less expensive than mainstream lolita brands, but you need to use a shopping service like SpreeNow to get them shipped to you. If that’s intimidating (and it is for me), you can check out Bodyline.

Bodyline’s quality is firmly known as, “Y’know, that’s...that’s fine...I guess it’s fine.” If you’re not sure if you want to get into lolita for a big time, that’s probably perfectly acceptable quality. I have a lot of Bodyline pieces, and I like them because they’re cheap, have acceptable quality, and are very easy to order from. Just look carefully at the pictures, and use your existing knowledge of lolita standards to make sure you’re not getting something that looks cosplay or very strange.

If you need the burando and don’t have the dollaroni, the two places that are best to buy used from are probably Lace Market and Wunderwelt. Closet Child is another used reseller, but I’ve never bought from them and don’t know what their shipping process is like.

Lace Market is a marketplace site for used lolita clothes, so your shipping experience will depend on who is selling them to you. Wunderwelt is a single store that sells used (and some new) items. Wunderwelt is also nice in that they’ll sell damaged dresses for relatively cheap. I’ve gotten Atelier Boz and Black Peace Now for $25 per dress, and they just needed a bit of cleaning up and a few stitches to make them work. Wunderwelt ships to the USA very easily.

Most lolita is sold by the measurement, not by a size, and Bodyline and Wunderwelt both post measurements. Someone on Lace Market should be able to provide them, if you ask.

If you want to make your first dress, here’s some tips. I’ll also pick up with making a handmade dress at the bottom of this post, because that topic builds on the rest of what I’ll say.

You need a petticoat. There are three different schools of thought about petticoats for your first look.

Option 1, get a really good petticoat off the bat. This one has the obvious advantage of coming out best in the long run. You will need a really good petticoat if you’re going to do lolita more than once or twice.

Option 2, make yourself a petticoat. This is my recommended if you want to sew lolita. If you’re sewing things, you need to know how to cut out rectangles and gather them evenly. Petticoats are nice to start on, because there’s quite a bit of forgiveness for errors.

Option 3, accept that your first coord will have a bad petticoat, and just don’t get a good one for your coordinate. You will get a ton of feedback about getting a better petticoat, but hey, you spent $19 and you could have spent $50.

If you’re getting a good petticoat, I love Wunderwelt’s petticoat. I’ve never had any trouble with this petticoat.

If you’re making your own, I have a tutorial here for the original petticoat tutorial, and here for an easier one that doesn’t have as much poof. I made both of these because I didn’t like the tutorials I found online for other petticoats, so I’m going to be arrogant and just only link my tutorials.

If you’re just going to get a bad petticoat, if you’re already ordering from Bodyline, you can use their petticoat gatcha and get a petticoat for $3. Will it be good? Will it be terrible? Will it be lime neon green? We just don’t know, but it’s $3.

[Fullview, lolita-inspired coordinate to show petticoat skills, not a good reference for actual lolita]

If you want a tiny bit more confidence and you’re already ordering from Bodyline, Pan088 is one that i got in a lucky pack and it’s acceptable, but not great.

Otherwise, just kind of go out there and look for a knee-length petticoat with not a lot of tulle hanging out at the bottom. Here’s a post about various petticoat shapes and it has some advice on picking a petticoat that’s not lolita-specific and that doesn’t look awful. Most importantly, pick a petticoat that you can’t see when you’re wearing the dress. Too little poof is better than your underwear hanging out from the bottom of your skirt. Just brace yourself for a lot of your initial coord feedback to be “try to get a better petticoat.”

Shoes. Again, two schools of thought here: get lolita-specific shoes, or get kinda okay shoes and accept your concrit about them.

Almost all my lolita shoes are from Bodyline, because they sometimes have good sales and then I go freaking nuts and buy shoes all over the place. Sometimes, they break apart, but I’ve written a couple of guides for fixing them. Soles fell off, toes blew out. (Note: I’ve discovered that for black/brown/white shoes, a vinyl/leather upholstery repair kit can fix blown out toes amazingly well, too) In this case, it’s a solid case of “well if you’re already ordering from Bodyline, might as well save on shipping.”

Cotton Candy Feet makes amazing shoes, too. I have not heard of them having a reputation for falling apart in Target while you’re just trying to buy some damn pasta.

If you’re going non-lolita sellers, be sure you’re familiar with what good lolita shoes look like. Demonia and Hades Footwear have some shoes that sometimes might work for some styles, and also sell shoes that don’t work for lolita at all. If you need to get them at a normie store, you can usually get away with a generic Mary Jane style, which a lot of stores will carry somewhere. If you’re doing that, just remember that the rounder the toe and the chunkier the heel, the better.

[fullview]

If you can’t find shoes in a color you like, Angelus brand leather paint is the only stuff I know that actually does the job and doesn’t flake off. Here’s my 10-year-old Bodyline tea parties that were once brown, had the toes blown out twice, and had to be re-soled with a chunk of fake leather and the bottom of a couch that we were going to light on fire. The shoes are damaged and uneven, but a glittery coat of Angelus on top of the regular gold paint hid most of that. Angelus glitter comes is like 25 colors so you can usually find one that matches. You can see the shoe on the right (my left shoe) looks a tiny bit funky. That’s the one that got fixed with the couch repair kit. 10/10 would recommend wearing your shoes until they’re absolutely dead.

Which gets me to another point, just as a side note, the Sam Vimes’ Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness: at a certain point, buying cheap lolita staples (stacking cheap petticoats and things like that) will cost you more money that buying the right thing on the second try. You want to cheap out on the first coord, that’s cool, but invest in better things for coord number 2. It saves you money and you also look better.

Mid-post note: I’ve said like three times that you can “just get something that’s not great and accept the concrit about it” and I need to add one more note: You can really only skip on one or two things per coord before it stops being a lolita coord and starts being a really strange outfit. You can mess up a thing or two. You can’t half-ass the whole coord and just say it’s still lolita when it only barely resembles it.

Blouse: If you’re wearing a JSK or a skirt, you need a blouse. I hope it was obvious that you need a blouse if you’re wearing a skirt, but we can’t be sure these days as to how people interpret your advice.

I’ve said it before, if you’re going to get into handmade lolita, you should absolutely buy your first lolita blouse, and you should buy a nice one. Most of the lolita standards are things that you understand better when you can touch the lace and look inside the blouse. You get a better understanding of how details are spaced and incorporated. You also can use that blouse for multiple coords, in addition to using it as inspiration and research.

At the time of me writing this, the cheapest blouse on Wunderwelt that looks like it’d work super well in my personal lolita style would run an alarming $36 for an Angelic Pretty blouse, $43 for Innocent World, $41 for Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, $46 for Metamorphose. A plain white collared shirt at Target from the women’s section is $35. $45 gets you actual brandname lolita brand blouse. Most of those blouses are ranked Class D (major stains or damage) by Wunderwelt’s quality system, but my professional opinion as a costume design and technician assesses that most of them need a good soak in some oxidizing cleaner and a nice press with an iron to be perfectly fine. (For those of you not familiar with the job of theatrical costume technician, I basically have a college degree in laundry).

If you want to make your own blouse, I have a pretty easy tutorial here for what we affectionately call “the lolita crop top” blouse. You can also grab a pattern for a regular button-down shirt and sub out the collar for the sort of technically wrong but easy and looks good collar pattern that I go over how to draft here. Just remember to keep the level of detail up! I know it’s just a blouse, but you don’t want it to be a plain and boring blouse.

[Fullview: Warning, cw snake, cw tobacco use, full picture contains my friend’s pet snake in the foreground and their hookah in the background]

You only get two points of “doing it wrong and not caring” before you have done the whole coord wrong, but if you want to do it wrong, you can just get a blouse with a pointed collar and decide that you don’t care if it’s wrong. If you make up for this with the rest of the coord being good, then you can probably get away with it.

Socks: You’ve got to put something on your legs. Legs are a great place to add details, because with a lot of lolita you want to cram every detail you can into it, in a balanced way.

If we want to compare to relatively solid-color dresses and two different approaches to the problem of adding details on the bottom half of the coordinate, you can see how me investing in some detailed socks breaks up the cream-colored space, and coordinates with the details in the umbrella. Navy tights that match the navy dress, with no color breakup, and then the gold shoes just draws the attention to the shoes looking out of place. (It’s worth noting that this coord did originally have a relatively ornate bonnet that balanced out the shoes better than the headbow, but I had to go out in public and didn’t want a giant spoon on my head).

So, if you can find them, patterned socks or tights really help with upping the level of detail. It’s relatively easy to find sheer tights with some kind of floral lace pattern on them, but in general we want our lolita leg covering to be opaque. Depending on many things, it might be possible to layer sheer patterned tights over opaque tights of a coordinating color, but you also need to look at the combination and be honest with yourself about if it actually looks good.

If you have socks, you can easily slap a line of lace around the top of them and get some additional detail level on them. (Side note, that post features the SAME BODYLINE TEA PARTIES)

Just, you know, put something covering your legs. Bonus points if it has details. Try to make it coordinate with what you already have. You probably don’t want ankle socks on your first go.

Stuff on Your Head: People who are making their own lolita often underestimate the amount of detail that you need to put on a headbow or headdress.

Here’s the outside of a Baby, the Stars Shine Bright bonnet. It has lace on the brim. It has rose lace on the lace. It has rose lace on the band. It has cluny lace on the rose lace. It has a bow. It has lace on the bow. It has a ruffle on the back. It has lace on the ruffle. This bonnet also has lace on the inside, to frame your face.

When you make or find your first hair accessory, make sure you have that level of detail. However, do not allow an obsession with the level of detail cause you to lose sight of the level of balance and taste that you also need. This bonnet has lace on velveteen on lace on lace on bow on lace, but it’s all in balance with itself.

When you first start, you might feel like a large hair accessory is a bit much. If you want to use one of your points of doing it wrong (remember, you only get 2), you might want to just check out the hair accessory section of your local department store, and get something more laid back. Just keep balance in mind. If your dress is very ornate, you need to continue that level of detail up into your head. If you are more casual and subdued, you can use a smaller bow.

If you want to make your own bow from scratch, I did a tutorial here. If you want something simpler than that, here’s a different tutorial (fun story, I posted this one when tumblr was cracking down on pr0n posts and they flagged it as inappropriate. First post, but not last post, that I had to appeal).

If you’re starting out, a good ol headbow is a good start, because they’re consistently accepted in every style. Bonnets, rectangle headdresses, tiny hats and tiny tiaras, and the so on, are all sort of specific to certain substyles. If you’re new, you’re probably not going to have the kind of experience to know when and where to use these.

The other part: Shoes, socks, petticoat, dress, blouse, bow, what else do you need?

Something.

You got a necklace, ring, wrist cuffs, cute bag? Just find that last thing or things to really make the coord complete. All lolita fashion is considered over the top by mainstream fashion (and if they thing casual lolita is over the top, they’re not ready for OTT sweet) so why not push it that last little bit to get it all the way over the top.

Don’t just go with the bare minimum. Also, if you used both of your “not doing this right and accepting the concrit” card, you probably want to find two additional, nice accessories for this part.

Okay so I know I said I’d talk more about making your first dress, but this took me too long to write and I have to go to work now so I’ll do that when I get back from work if I remember and my shift doesn’t kill me. Be nice to your retail associates, people, or else they’ll anonymously post about you to their 1800 blog followers.

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