Welcome 2020. Someone on the internet suggested posting your beginning vs. end of decade comparison for reflections sake. To my surprise, it turns out that 2010 was actually when I started wearing lolita fashion and participating in the online community.
I always had a hard time remembering the exact year I started gaining interest in lolita, but it seems that I started wearing the actual clothes in 2010 based of some time stamps on my old Photobucket account. It’s quite possible I started lurking the EGL Livejournal community as early as 2008 since my Livejournal account was created in early 2009. It wasn’t always smooth sailing; I definitely did have an undocumented ita phase before making my first daily_lolita post in 2010.
Visual kei and anime were my gateways into lolita fashion. Anime and manga such as Princess Princess, Chobits, and Kuroshitsuji gave me a vague idea about what gothic lolita looked like in general. I started proper research into the subculture when visual kei band Versailles made a collaboration with Alice and the Pirates. The Baby, the Stars Shine Bright website was poorly designed back then with not much instruction in English, so I needed help and joined the EGL Livejournal community. That was the start of the descent into the rabbit hole.
Now look at this glow up! It tuns out that I’ve only known one pose this whole time. Has much really changed though? I wonder. I just leveled up from N to SSR. I don’t think I’ve changed much myself, but the online lolita community, brands, and the subculture certainly have.
Towards the end of 2019, I was pretty unmotivated with lolita and ouji fashion as a whole. None of the new releases were sparking my interest, so my wardrobe felt pretty stagnant hence why there’s no 2020 wardrobe post. I also outgrew a lot of the stuff I bought as a teenager, so they are taking up a lot of space. I’ll admit, I don’t feel the same spark for ouji style as I did years ago. The young lad look doesn’t feel quite me anymore, so I’ll be moving towards a more mature aristocratic style.
For 2020, I have a few goals. One, I’m aiming to clean out and refine my style. Having a big wardrobe doesn’t really matter to me anymore, so I’ll focus less on quantity. Two, I want to make a proper inspiration folder. I’m awful at bookmarking and saving images, so when I try to look for something I’ve seen before, it often leads to some frustration when I can’t find what I’m looking for. Three, restart posting more frequently. Not every photo or post I put out needs to be perfect! Trying to make everything perfect definitely sucked the fun out of things. Blog culture is supposedly dead according to most, but I don’t it to be completely gone, so I’ll do my best to keep it up. Four, I need to organize my files better. My hard drive is honestly a mess between juggling fashion, food, event, and stock photos. In summary, I need to do a lot of cleaning! Cheers to 2020 and good luck to me.
