Style Guides: Gothic Lolita

Image via Kawaii.i International

To start off the new Style Guide section, we begin with a favourite of mine, Gothic Lolita.

I first personally discovered Lolita as a whole (there are many sub-styles of Lolita, Gothic is just one of them) way back in 2005, but it has existed for much longer.

Lolita itself began in the 1970's, the Gothic substyle reached the height of it's popularity in the late 90's to the early 2000's thanks to the influence of Mana Sama (formerly of the band Malice Mizer, now in Moi Dix Mois), who now has his own Lolita fashion brand Moi Meme Moitie.

Image via Japanese Streets

What sets Gothic apart from the other styles of Lolita is the dark colour palette and themes such as religious icons, crumbling buildings and climbing roses.
Be warned though, while it is occasionally possible to make a Gothic outfit using a Sweet dress, it is pretty rare, and just using the black version of a print doesn't automatically make it Gothic.

The bare essentials

The absolute minimum of items you'd need to dress in Lolita are:

 An OP or "Onepeice", basically a Lolita dress that has sleeves, meaning that you could wear it without a blouse (it's pretty bad form to wear a JSK without a blouse, sometimes it's ok to do so, but generally it's rather faux pas and should be avoided if possible).

A petticoat to provide the correct shape.

Knee high or over the knee socks (these should co-ordinate with the OP, if you cannot get any that have the same pattern make sure they at least use the same colours as the OP).

Suitable shoes. These don't need to be rocking horse shoes, so long as they match the "cute" aesthetic you should be good to go, so for reference stripper heels = baaaaaaaaad, doll style shoes = good.

A hair accessory, you could use a large bow that co-ordinates with the colours of the rest of the outfit.

Basic Lolita by louisemarysmith featuring happy socks

Where to buy

Moi Meme Moitie
Atelier Pierrot
Chantilly
Triple Fortune
Atelier Boz
Suppurate System
Miho Matsuda

Surface Spell Gothic
R-Series
Classical Puppets
Ichigo 15
Infanta
Kids Yoyo
Yolanda

Rouge Aerie Designs
Fan Plus Friend

I'd add some of my own photos, but I wear Lolita a lot and you've seen all of my photos so I don't want to keep posting repeats.