If You See a Girl on the Street Dressed Like This, Please Don't Sneak Photos of Her

Lolita fashion enthusiasts care about only one thing: their “real self.”

“Tuwan” became a “lo girl” at the end of March. She calls herself a “two-dimensional person” — an ACG (anime, comics and games) fan — and before that she had only ever watched from the outside, never imagining what she would look like if she got into it herself.

Tuwan works at a company that researches youth culture. At a trends-sharing session, someone brought up an article about “lo girls,” and the company's founder egged her on to “wear a little dress to work,” even tracking down a studio that made this kind of dress for her. “You know, once you put clothes like this on, the whole person changes. That's how I got into it,” Tuwan told QDaily.

If all this leaves you baffled, here is the simple version: a lo girl is a woman who likes to wear Lolita clothing (and, accordingly, a lo boy is a man who likes to wear it). Lolita clothing is not just a dress — it is a whole outfit: blouse, dress, stockings, a petticoat, round-toed leather shoes, hair accessories, wrist accessories and more. Some enthusiasts wear wigs too.

The centerpiece of the outfit — the Lolita dress — usually falls to the knee, with a cinched waist to bring out the wearer's waistline. The skirts are wide, held out by a cupcake-shaped petticoat underneath. Add bows, lace and embroidery, and the dress looks fine and lavish.

Following all these rules looks like a lot of work. Tuwan did plenty of homework the first time: which brands were reliable, where to buy clothes like these. In the end she found a long list of recommended brands in the Lolita culture magazine girlism 少女主义, followed the brands' accounts, and through them found a Japan-based personal shopper, from whom she bought two dresses. “There are quite a lot of unwritten rules like this, and the community may have rules of its own too. I was afraid my ignorance, or some mistake in my research, would break one of them,” she said.

Even so, Tuwan felt a little timid the first time she decided to wear Lolita clothes to work. She passed over a black knee-length dress from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright and chose a little dress from axes femme instead — not much lace, just a carousel pattern embroidered along the hem. The petticoat, headpiece, stockings and shoes all matched, of course. Finally she tied the bow at her blouse collar, checked herself over and over in the mirror, and walked out the door holding a parasol.

Recalling the office's reaction afterward, she put it this way: “Even dressed like that, everyone still said, ‘Oh, you're so lolita!’”

It's true that people who aren't Lolita enthusiasts can't really tell the difference between this and a fancy dress. Earlier, when Tuwan tried the outfit on at home, her roommate said, “Oh, I have a gown like that too.”

Tuwan said: “I didn't argue with her. I just said, ‘Yeah, it's pretty cute.’”

Lolita, a Fashion Style

Lolita clothing is a branch of Japan's Harajuku style, and it has basically nothing to do with Nabokov's novel. It draws on Victorian and Rococo-era dress, and on Gothic and punk culture, and it splits into three main styles: Sweet, Classic and Gothic. It has also spawned offshoots such as Punk, Hime (princess) and Ouji (prince).

Tokyo's street fashion started in Harajuku. The Harajuku style means the faction that sticks to its own look and lets no one else sway it. This youth subculture has always stood for young Japanese people's need to let off pressure; they want a spiritual way out. In the 1970s Japan got its fashion magazines, and Harajuku trends spread across the country through them. That was also when the early Lolita brands appeared — Pink House, Milk and Pretty (later Angelic Pretty).

The better-known Baby, the Stars Shine Bright and Metamorphose temps de fille followed. Only in the 1990s was the style formally called “Lolita fashion.” What really brought it to a wider public was the film Kamikaze Girls; the Baby Lolita dresses in it became the brand's best advertisement.

It has now been 12 years since that classic opened. The film carried the heat of Lolita culture back to Britain again. Faulkner, an expert on the history of modern Japanese crafts, argues: “If British punk rock was a violent rejection of the establishment, then Japanese Lolita fashion absorbed that style and turned it into another form of expression. It is a means of expressing individuality — a silent rejection.”

In 2012, talking to the Asahi Shimbun, Akiko Fukai, director of the Kyoto Costume Institute, went so far as to predict that Lolita fashion would in future draw attention as a counter-current to luxury fashion. Which is not unreasonable: Lolita culture gives this kind of fashion spending a stronger pull, and these consumers in their early twenties have loaded Lolita dresses with added value of a sort you normally see only among the staunchest followers of luxury brands.

Lo girls treat these clothes as one of their everyday looks. Like any fashion enthusiast, they can place the style of every little dress at a glance — and even when they can't name it, they know which brand made it. A lo girl's closet is always one dress short, and when they get together to talk, most of the talk is about new Lolita releases.

During the Beijing film festival, Tuwan went to a mall in Shilipu, Beijing. Kamikaze Girls was screening there, so Baby — one of the most famous Japanese Lolita brands — seized the chance to hold a free offline event called a “tea party.” More than 100 people came.

Tuwan did not dress up for it. Looking back, she said, “I was still young and clueless.”

When she walked in, what she found was a crowd in extraordinarily cute, lavish outfits. “At the tea party I didn't talk to them. I was too nervous; I felt like some kind of creep. But I did approach two of them and ask if I could take their photo, because I thought their dresses were beautiful. I think those two girls were younger than me — college students, late teens or early twenties, very shy. They kept saying, ‘Sure, take the photo, but can you blur out our faces?’ But I noticed their passion for the dresses ran far ahead of any passion for people.”

Afterward Tuwan deliberately stayed out of the line for group photos, because she felt what she had on “could only count as everyday clothes.”

Big tea parties like this don't happen often. Lolita brands hold events every few months or once a quarter, usually to launch new products with a runway show or to wrap up the year; the enthusiasts who turn up in full dress use the tea party to bond and swap notes.

More common are gatherings of a dozen or so close friends who share the hobby. Huahuo, a Lolita enthusiast who works at the ACG video site AcFun, often gets invited to small get-togethers like these. “A lot of them are built around eating — we wear whatever Lolita outfit we're happy with and go eat hotpot, skewers, whatever.” These enthusiasts can show up in full dress at any occasion that looks casual, if they feel like it.

After the tea party broke up, Tuwan and a few other lo girls went to line up for cold drinks at the McDonald's downstairs. “First someone gave me a look, then an ‘Earthling’ cut in line behind me. The person originally behind me was a lo girl in an even more lavish printed dress. When I pushed that ‘Earthling’ aside so the lo girl could order, I suddenly felt everyone's eyes burning into us,” Tuwan said.

Lo Girls and “Earthlings”

Hostility toward Lolita culture is, at bottom, the crudeness that comes from not knowing. People understand neither the precociously sexual girl in Nabokov's Lolita nor why an adult would put herself in such an innocent, romantic dress (the two have nothing to do with each other). They mock these women as being as strange as aliens, so the women in Lolita dresses mock themselves right back: “Right, right, you're the normal Earthlings.”

What angers them most is what they call “theft shooting” — in plain terms, being photographed on the sly. On the Baidu Lolita forum there is a popular thread titled “What do you do when you run into sneak-shot creeps?” One forum member, “Mr. Killing Intent in My Pants,” once took the bullet train home from school in Lolita clothes; afterward a photo taken of her on the sly turned up on her school's forum, the poster writing in the title: “School's out, and the crazies are out too.” That thread, a straight personal attack, has since been deleted by the moderator — “but it was really upsetting to see at the time.”

Relatively open cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou — have the most lo girls. One Beijing lo-girl QQ group that Huahuo belongs to holds more than 600 members. Walking down the street and passing a girl in a poofy, lavish dress with a parasol is no longer especially rare — even if you have no idea what she is wearing is Lolita clothing, and file her outfit under cosplay, or a maid costume, or some odd stage getup.

Next to the stares they draw on the street, lo girls are much freer and more relaxed on forums, Weibo and other more private communities — probably true of any niche-culture enthusiast. Alena loves the atmosphere of the Lolita forum; she checks featured threads like “new releases discussion” and “daily outfit posts” almost every day, and studies how other girls put their outfits together. Besides clothes, they talk about work, school and relationships, and vent the negativity of daily life. It feels, Alena says, “pretty reassuring.”

Huahuo has fallen into several hobbies at once: Lolita, cosplay and hanfu (traditional Chinese dress). By her own account she doesn't mind “being taken by Earthlings for a cosplayer or a maid.” “When I wear hanfu on the street, fewer people say ‘cosplay’ — more and more people now say it's hanfu. Sometimes people come up and ask, ‘Is there an event on? How much do you charge for a promo gig?’” If curious people ask at school, she just says she's in the anime club.

That is probably a safe thing to say, because ACG culture is not entirely fringe on campus. “I saw the students a few years below me at my old high school dancing otaku dances on the sports field, and it stunned me — this is the middle school attached to Jiaotong University. Basically every middle school there has an anime club, some organization for people who share the hobby; the mood is fairly free, fairly tolerant. Not long ago one of my high school teachers even asked to borrow a little dress of mine for an opening-ceremony performance.”

A friend taught Huahuo a trick: if someone photographs her, she can photograph them back, or just stare straight at them. She reckons she isn't very sensitive about sneak shots. What she minds more is the crudeness of judging people by their looks. “At work, for instance, I don't want people thinking I'm a little girl who can't be trusted with anything just because I wear Lolita clothes.” Luckily her company's culture is decent enough — she has plenty of lo-girl coworkers, spread across every kind of job, from engineers to designers to operations staff.

But the men around her don't take to Lolita fashion. Not just straight men, gay friends too. “They'll look at a Lolita outfit and say, ‘That's fetish wear for prostitutes.’ But it really isn't — I think these dresses cover you up incredibly thoroughly.”

One interesting thing: the mothers of many of the lo girls we interviewed took to the hobby smoothly, or at least never said anything fierce about it.

Tuwan used to hate high heels and wore nothing but black, white and gray in a plain, Uniqlo-ish style; it was her mother, a generation older, who liked soft pastels. The two of them “rarely talked,” and always disagreed about clothes. But the first time her mother caught sight of Tuwan in a Lolita outfit at home, she suddenly “happily offered a whole pile of suggestions.” Not the old you-should-change-your-clothes kind, but constructive ones: “You could add something to that headpiece,” or “You could fix up your dress a bit to make it look nicer.”

Tuwan said: “I can feel that she has a girlish heart of her own, and she really wants to see it come out through me. My mother and I hardly talk, but a few days after I sent her photos of the dress, she sent me a photo asking whether her own new dress looked good. That almost never happens.”

A Business Getting Hotter and Hotter in China

On price, Lolita clothes are expensive. On craft, a good Lolita dress comes close to haute couture.

Alena got into it in her second year of college. “At first I bought domestic brands — cheaper, under a thousand yuan, a price I could carry. At the start you pay a deposit once a month (a third of the price), it ships in three to four months, and then you pay the balance. Splitting it into a deposit and a balance makes it look cheaper.” By now even her mother, who used to love buying her clothes, has no idea what these dresses cost.

Assembling a full Lolita outfit by the rules costs roughly 1,500 to 4,000 yuan, and that is before makeup. Because production runs are small, a dress from a Japanese Lolita brand generally runs 1,500 to 3,000 yuan, while a domestic brand's runs about 400 to 1,000 yuan. In China, college students are the main buyers of Lolita brands, but the relatively high prices raise a barrier for would-be newcomers hoping to “join the circle.”

Even so, “Kayi Datoujia,” editor-in-chief of girlism, believes the number of lo girls in China has snowballed over the past two years, while Japan's cultural peak has passed — the whole Lolita market is shifting toward China.

Youyi Meimei, a lo boy living in Tokyo, senses the same thing. Having followed Japanese Lolita brands closely for years, Youyi Meimei spotted 2014 as the dividing line. “Before December 2014, customers of the Japanese brands split about half Chinese, half Japanese; after that, Chinese customers were around 80 percent.” Demand ran so hot that these Japanese brands at one point imposed strict purchase limits — they weren't even ready to receive this new crop of lo girls.

In February this year, Kayi Datoujia took Misako Aoki to New York Fashion Week. Besides being a Lolita fashion model, Misako Aoki is also president of the Japan Lolita Association. They came at the invitation of soufflesong, a Chinese Lolita brand — the first appearance by a domestic Lolita brand at New York Fashion Week.

More than twenty tall Western models walked the runway in Lolita dresses designed by Chinese designers. Aoki, the only Asian model, came out last, in a white “bridal” Lolita dress, carrying a bouquet.

The sight surprised many lo girls back in China; a short video of Aoki's walk was reposted more than 3,000 times on Weibo.

All of it comes out of the fast growth of domestic Lolita brands. He Jia, a Taobao shop owner, estimates that since 2012 the number of domestic Lolita brands has gone from a few dozen to more than a hundred.

It was in 2012 that He Jia and some friends began planning the domestic Lolita brand “Long Ears and Pointed Ears.” A fashion design graduate, she had also spent a stretch as a Japan-based personal shopper for Lolita clothes before running her own brand. From the start she never worried much about sales. “As long as something looks good, plenty of people will buy it,” she said. At the time no domestic brand had released a dress with an original print; most shop owners bought finished fabric and made patterns from it, while her team had already started recruiting illustrators. They built the brand's logo around a rabbit and a cat, wrote them entertaining adventure stories, and those stories became the source of the prints. Fairy-tale as the brand's name sounds, He Jia did not want their designs confined to the Sweet style.

Good illustrators and good prints are always scarce. They have to chase several illustrators' print designs at once, revising details over and over, and only once a print is settled does it go to a factory for pattern-making.

He Jia hopes to build a brand culture of her own and, in time, to stand alongside the famous Japanese brands — which is not easy. A single Lolita style often draws orders of only a few hundred pieces, the workmanship is complicated, and many contract factories won't take the job. By He Jia's account, if a domestic brand's dress sells more than 1,000 pieces, that is already remarkable. Between being a talking point and being purchasing power lies a lot of distance.

“Lolita is so hot right now for two reasons: one, Lolita culture is gradually becoming familiar to everyone; two, I think it also has to do with ACG culture, which is expanding very fast… I remember that before I even had the concept of Lolita, the cosplayers of that time often cosplayed SD dolls, and I already liked that style of dress — including back when we watched Cardcaptor Sakura. I didn't know a dress like that could be called Lolita, but I liked the style. Then I came across Kamikaze Girls. For people my age, the road everyone took was probably much the same,” He Jia told QDaily.

Still, the Lolita scene in China keeps filling out. A phone app made for lo girls, Qunbai (“Skirt Hem”), has appeared. Enthusiasts can read Lolita news on it, show off their own outfits and trade styling notes with others. An alert for dresses going on sale has also made it easier for lo girls to “buy, buy, buy.”

But Kayi Datoujia holds back on commercialization. “I think this circle still shies away from talking about commercialization,” she said. Her reason: for a group of people the outside world finds strange, whether they are being used commercially is a very sore point.

Kayi Datoujia would rather talk about the culture behind Lolita clothes — the consumer psychology underneath, for instance. Beyond the pull of ACG culture, she thinks Lolita fashion caught on in China for reasons of its own. “China doesn't encourage dressing up — that's the general social air. Think about when we were children: we wore such ugly school uniforms, right up to eighteen. There was no love of beauty in any of it. Worse, in middle or high school any girl who dressed a bit prettier got talked about. From childhood, everyone's instinct to love beauty was held down.”

Many of the people we interviewed brought up “a life more your own” — Momoko, played by Kyoko Fukada in Kamikaze Girls, became a spiritual idol for many, a woman who ended up living the life she wanted on her own terms. Huahuo thinks “Lolita clothes are like my battle armor,” while Tuwan feels “I can become beautiful; it has brought me more possibility and more curiosity.”

None of this may have much to do with business or with socializing. A subculture's expression in society always has an urgent side; that is the road it must take to catch mainstream culture's eye. But for each person, in the end it is all about “that real self.”

As Huahuo put it: “I don't much like socializing inside the so-called circle. I just want to wear my dresses in peace.”

(Suji Yan also contributed to this article.)

Cover image from: Flickr