Miss Filigree

I've been wanting to make a post like this for ages, but unfortunately I'm extremely inconsistent with taking coord pictures! I like taking them, I just consistently forget or think "I'll do it later"and then don't, or one designated person takes them and then forgets to upload them. I go to lots of meetups, I wear lolita a ton, yet I have very little coord pictures. So these aren't all recent, some are several years old, but I still figured it would be fun to upload them! One of my oldest coords period, possibly five years old! For a Metamorphose meetup. I still quite like this one, but I'd go with OTKs if I were to wear this again because the skirt of this dress is very short and I feel it creates an awkward gap. The white frill under the dress is an underskirt to hide that I didn't have a petticoat of decent length yet, not the actual petti so no worries! (also, so little makeup! Even with oldschool I wear far more today) Another oldie,...

Long hair is sort of a universal ideal in lolita. If you wear sweet you go big poofy pigtails, if you wear classic you go long and straight or braided, if you wear gothic you tease it up. No matter the substyle, the vast majority of snaps have some sort of long hairdo, so much so that people constantly ask for short hair inspo because it’s so hard to find! Maybe you too love long hair and are thinking of growing it out, but you don’t know where to start. Sure your scalp will be doing most of the work, but you have to keep it healthy and you’re the one who’ll be styling it for meetups. If you’re that person, then this post is for you! Of course this isn’t some all-encompassing Long Hair Bible, it’s meant as a short introduction with some basic tips to get you started. I based all of these on things that work for me personally- for reference, my hair is caucasian, on the thin side and tangles easily (and yet comes down to my hips! So even difficult hair can be super long). If your hair i...

I've mentioned before on this blog that I have a very wide interest in fashion, and I especially like gyaru. I follow a couple blogs and I'm in the big online community, and on both a reoccurring subject is the death of gyaru and how to bring it back. It got me to wonder why gyaru (and many styles with it) died while lolita remains as popular as ever, if not bigger than it's ever been! From what I could find, there are several reasons why lolita is still massive while other styles are slowly dying. Like I said, gyaru isn't the only style that faded from the limelight in the past years. styles like decora and fairy kei also died. A large chunk of why this happened is simply because Japan is aging - decora and fairy kei and gyaru are mainly styles worn by teenagers and early twentysomethings over there. They've grown up and moved on- wearing alt fashion as a grown up unfortunately is looked down upon. Sure there are new teenagers but they tend to flock to cheap s...

This day my mother and I took off to the fabric district! I had intended to buy some wa printed cottons, some lace, mayyybe look for a kimono for remaking. I’d looked at the best shops to go beforehand, because to see all 80+ shops I’d need a whole ‘nother three weeks of vacation. I chose Tomato as my shop to definitely visit and I figured I’d see what else I’d find on my path. We walked through the district, which was a seamstresses heaven! Shops for leatherware, supplies, trims, I even saw a shop 100% about tassel trims! Pretty quickly we found Tomato, or rather, one of the five(!) Tomato branch shops on that street. We went in and just...it was. Lolita heaven. Dreamy floral prints, oodles of the most gorgeous lace, I even saw some lace I recall BTSSB using, and they had two lolita coords on display as example!! The blouse on the left has woven flowers in the fabric too! If you’ve ever tried to sew anything lolita related yourself you probably know that th...

I designated the fourth day in Japan as a full on shop day, as there was a lolita secondhand market scheduled that day. I went on my way late-ish, so I didn’t expect to find the bargain of my life, but I hoped to find some cute tops or jewelry. I was worried that finding the place was going to be hard, but as soon as I entered Takeshita Dori I saw signs pointing me in the right direction.  The red sign was for the event space! Cheap buys this way! Strangely enough the hand was pointing at some stairs going down...which was the wrong way. Oops! One was held by a lolita in a very OTT outfit, even on Takeshita Dori it was hard to miss! I went up into the rented space and was, to my surprise, greeted in English by a western girl. The “international lolita” thing turned out to be actually true!  One of the event hosts. Such a cute coord, and such a cute dress! Event space. By the time I arrived most of the good buys were gone, but still fun! The market itsel...

On friday I went to Kawagoe, in Saitama prefecture but technically still in Tokyo, to meet my Japanese family! My great-grandmother was Japanese, and even though we share the tiniest bit of blood we were really excited to meet! I’ll keep their names shortened for their privacy.  I was invited over to Kawagoe because it was nice and central for all my family members, and it’s a beautiful old village. It turned out Kawagoe is also called Little Edo because half the city center is authentically Edo, including a bell tower that’s famous throughout Japan. I met up with A-san and Ai-san at the station (after walking right past eachother, followed by a panicked phone call where they were) and we took a bus to the center. A-san had booked a kimono rental service and reserved lunch for the day. The kimono rental place was incredibly small! It consisted of a small porch with hanging curtains, a heightened tatami floor with kimono racks and a dressing room the size of a big closet.  ...

Heya! Guess who’se online! Unfortunately I can’t upload any pictures yet as I didn’t bring my laptop, so these posts will be just text until I get back and edit these. Sorry!   12/04 edit: here are the pictures!   (I’ll make some posts depending on how interesting the things I did were, I’ll probably combine days where I didn’t do too much) Nothing happened on our very first day in Japan, we spent it dragging suitcases around Tokyo and cursing, and when we got to the airBnB at 4 in the midday we went straight to bed, that’s how badly the trip wore us out! The second day however, we got up early to head to Harajuku.  The first half of the day centered around bank problems, because it turned out even though the logos on our cards were on any and every ATM, we couldn’t actually withdraw any money! We figured out a way eventually but it was a super convoluted one and having to fight with bank employees while you just want to shop really puts kind of a bad aftertas...