In my early days as a beginner Lolita, the central hub of information for the
English-speaking community was LiveJournal. And over the years, the information has
spread all over the place, and now I feel that there is no central meeting place for Lolita
fashion or community information. Which, in a way, kind of sucks,
because it was really easy back in the day to give beginner Lolitas this one link
that would give you all of this information. But it's also good, because in the LiveJournal
days, people felt really limited in the fashion, because you were often
trying to gain the approval of this small online community in places like Daily Lolita LiveJournal,
which led to a lot of misconceptions about the rules and restrictions and judgments.
And there was a severe lack of visibility of different varying Lolitas.
When it comes to participating and being involved in Lolita fashion, I think it's so,
so, incredibly, incredibly important to get your information from multiple resources,
and to just gather in as much information as possible, and sort of figure out for yourself
how you want to dress in it, and what your level of participation and commitment is.
And I found that a lot of the times, Lolitas kind of get tired of sharing information, and will
often say to newbies, just look up the resources. The resources are there. Which yes, they are,
but I feel like it might be a little bit difficult and overwhelming to figure out
where to start, or where certain things are. If you have certain questions, where can you
find those answers? And my hope for this video is to be able to present these resources in a way
that you can follow, and maybe for veteran Lolitas, you can share this with newbies.
Or even veterans, you might find things that you maybe didn't know about or forgot about.
And Lolita fashion constantly has resources that are outdated, or have broken links,
so hopefully these are a bunch of things that will help you learn more and share
more information about Lolita fashion. Before we dive into things, I wanted
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Lolita Fashion Wiki is a great resource to explain what Lolita fashion is,
as well as explain different substyles of the fashion. Whereas Lolibrary is a
database of all Lolita fashion releases. And this could be things like dresses from
mainline brands, dresses from indie brands, and also Moitie cookies.
They are so dedicated to archiving Lolita fashion. I use Lolibrary all the time to
look up different dresses. But I also find it really entertaining
to look at the "other" category, because brands have released some really interesting things.
It's easy to take Lolibrary for granted and assume that it will always be there,
but I personally live in constant fear that it will one day disappear.
Because I remember hello lace. Now, I'm not going to talk too much about hello
lace in this video because I'm working on a video about defunct Lolita websites.
But there is something that I miss from hello lace that I wanted to mention. hello
lace was a similar database website that had different Lolita releases.
But they also had a bunch of thorough sections about Lolita fashion itself.
So it was an easy website to send to people to learn about the fashion,
and also see different releases. A Lolita community that I participated
in actually printed out hello lace's "what is Lolita?" page so that when we were out at events
and other people that weren't Lolitas would stop us and ask what we're doing, what we're
dressed up as, they would hand them this flyer. Which I think is really smart and helpful. You
might think it's rude to like, not explain to someone and just hand them a piece of paper,
but this is actually like a safety issue. Because when you're with a large group of people,
and then other people are stopping them, you could get separated from the group, you could get lost.
So it's really nice to be able to hand them something and not have to
take the time to explain. Which I think is like, a resource that we're missing.
And if there is some graphic designer out there who wants to make like, a little pamphlet,
a handout, a flyer, I would be so grateful. And I think that that would be a great resource
for communities to have to just like, hand out. Or you can go into, you know,
Lolita Fashion Wiki, print out that page. You can go to hello lace on Wayback machine
and print out their "what is Lolita?" explanation. It was a pretty good, thorough, quick explanation.
It's important to remember that Lolibrary is not run by some big company, it's
literally just a small group of dedicated Lolitas who love archiving the fashion.
I know I'm not going to talk much about shopping-- I forgot to mention in my introduction that
this video is going to act as a sort of prerequisite to another video I'm working on,
which is a Lolita shopping guide. This video is more about resources
pertaining to education of Lolita, inspiration, as well as community.
There are a few shopping resources scattered throughout this, but I'm
working on a much larger shopping video. So please subscribe, and stay tuned for that.
But Lace Market is a secondhand website for Lolita fashion, and using Lolibrary in conjunction
with places like Lace Market, Closet Child, Wonderwelt, it can help you when you're going to
sell something yourself, or if you're shopping for something, and you want to see maybe more details,
or get a little bit more history on the item. I'm really grateful to the Lolibrarians
who are constantly updating Lolibrary. I've wanted to give back to Lolibrary for
so long, but with my really inconsistent income, I never knew when I'd be comfortable to donate.
And I realized that their Patreon is really affordable. It's only two dollars.
You get access to more behind-the-scenes information and their Discord, where they
are constantly researching different items and talking about nostalgia.
I really, really encourage the support of Lolibrary, because
we can't just assume that it'll be around forever. And these are people
who are taking time out of their day to work on this, and I'm really appreciative of it.
And if you can, please donate. Please support them and Lolibrary.
When I first started in Lolita fashion, something that really helped me understand
it was looking at it in Gothic Lolita Bible. And unfortunately, these are now out of print.
You can still buy them secondhand, but a great resource online that's free is the
Lolita History Gallery, which has a ton of scans from a bunch of print publications.
Not just Gothic Lolita Bible, but a ton of Japanese fashion magazines.
And I really love this website. With the recent ban of the terms "Lolita"
and "Harajuku Fashion" on Pinterest, I think that this is a great replacement for that.
It is a place where you can just look and brainstorm, and see ideas of how to style
Lolita, different photo shoot, different poses. A great resource for photographers. I've given
this as a resource to photographer friends who are not even Lolita at all, but it's just really
helpful to get those creative thoughts. It's really hard to put into words all of
the different aspects and elements of Lolita fashion, the different like, collars, sleeves,
styles, skirt shapes, prints, lengths. And just absorbing all of it by looking
at examples really helps you kind of flesh out this idea of what it's supposed to look like.
And I think that having that base can also help you find areas where you can experiment.
And I also think that in a lot of these magazines you can see street snaps, which shows people
wearing it daily, and they're not as restricted, because they're not in a photo shoot setting.
So you can definitely see different elements that they have adapted for comfort or be experimental
with. Definitely check out Lolita History Gallery. I often talk about LiveJournal as if it's dead
and gone, but it is still up there. EGL LiveJournal is still around,
and it is really rarely updated. I don't think anyone really uses it.
But there is still a huge backlog of information on that site. And it's good to now look at it
with like, 2023 glasses and be critical of it, rather than being actively involved in the past.
You can sort of choose what you want to take from it.
You can also sort of feel updated if you are a newer Lolita, and you're just getting involved,
you can kind of see what the community was like in the past and feel a little bit more in on it.
YouTube is a great resource for Lolitas, and you should not just be watching my channel.
There are so many other Lolita fashion YouTubers, too many for me to even name.
I am not entirely sure who made this document, but there is a document of Lolita YouTubers.
Because searching within YouTube can be sort of tricky because of words being wrongly blocked,
and just that whole mess. But this is a great way to
find more Lolita fashion YouTubers. And there's even a tab for active
and inactive, which I think that even inactive videos are great to watch.
You can help feel nostalgic and just get more information about the fashion from different
perspectives, different time periods. So it looks like there's over 80 Lolitas
on this document, so that is so much content for you to enjoy.
My original idea for this video was to make fun of Reddit. And I've never been a redditor,
but people had told me that the Lolita subreddits, r/lolita and r/lolitafashion were dead,
and you know, full of misinformation, and no one was really using them.
And it was kind of like the place where Lolitas who didn't know anything about
Lolita would go and not find answers. And this is what I'd been led to believe,
but I actually took a look for myself and saw that that was not the case at all.
I have a hypothesis that before the Panda Express-- I don't know, is that word still
blocked on YouTube? I'm just gonna play it safe-- I think that Reddit may have been a
wasteland a few years ago, but now with the boom of new Lolitas with more active online spaces,
because people weren't able to be together in person, so a lot of online spaces just flourished
and grew, I think that Reddit is one of them. Both of these subreddits are updated every
month with a monthly mega thread of questions, where Lolitas can go and ask whatever questions.
And people are actively answering them. And they're answering them with correct information.
And there is actually a bunch of different resources that I found through Reddit,
which is why this video has changed so much. Because rather than just poke fun at it, there's
actually so many useful things for Lolitas to use, and I wanted to kind of put them all in one place.
It seems like out of the two, r/lolita is more active than r/lolitafashion,
but I think that using both of them is very helpful. And it almost seems like a smaller
scale of EGL LiveJournal, because people are posting like their coordinates, people are
posting different thoughts and questions. And yeah, it just seems like a small
community of EGL that's more active. Through this reddit, I actually found the Lolita
Community Directory. Joining a Lolita community in-person and online can be so beneficial.
It can provide you with a ton of support, lifelong friends, access to like local swap
meets or small-scale secondhand shopping that you might not have otherwise.
But it's always been this question of, how do I find a community? Because a great deal of
them are hosted on Facebook, but it's harder to search for them because they are private.
Well, there is this huge directory of them. I wanted to mention that Lolita communities are
not private to be gatekeepy or exclusionary. It is for safety reasons. They want to be able to
vet the people that are joining it to make sure that their participants are safe, to make sure
that you're joining it for the right reasons. The joining process for every community is a
little bit different, but you will likely be asked a few basic questions just to make sure
that you are actually interested in Lolita, that you have a little bit of a foundation
of what the fashion is, and that you will respectfully participate in their community.
It's so wonderful to have this directory for people to find.
And even if you are a Lolita that likes to travel, and you want to check in with
local communities of places that you're traveling, there's a directory for you.
I know that I didn't want to get too much into shopping,
but one of the most frequently asked questions are looking for plus size Lolita resources,
and there is a master list of all of them. Like there's a few ones that I've shared before,
like Milk Circus's blog, and a few other spreadsheets, but this
is like everything compiled into one. There is advice, there is shopping.
There are a list of influencers that make content around plus-sized Lolita.
So all of it is like in one place, which is really helpful.
Because I've definitely seen a couple of these links thrown around at random, so to have all
of them in one spot together, so helpful. Maho Queen has a Lolita resource master
list that is really often updated. It was last updated earlier this month.
There is a list for blogs, there's a list for advice and help, keeping up-to-date, inspiration,
YouTubers-- thank you for mentioning me-- crafting resources, Taobao help,
plus size resources-- which, there's more in the other lists that I gave-- Taobao help,
secondhand shopping, shopping services. So if you want to have a list of shopping,
here you go. Organizations-- obviously, there's more in the Lolita directory,
but just a few of them. Discord servers. I don't know how up-to-date this one is, because
I tried to join Dearlolita TO, and it's been a little while, and there's been no update, I don't
think. It seems like Discord servers in Lolita are not super active, at least from what I've seen.
I don't know, maybe people are scared to let me in. I would like to join a Lolita Discord server.
I'm part of the Lolibrary one, which I'm really grateful for. That one is pretty active. But yeah,
I want to join. I love Discord. I want to join more discords. So
if there are other Discord servers that are active, please let me know.
Here is where I plug my Patreon and my private Discord server, which is very active and very fun.
And you can join this server at any level above my first one on Patreon.
A great, great resource-- I have bookmarked this, you should bookmark it too-- Crimson
Reflections has so many great blog entries for like, very specific Lolita questions.
And I'm sure that if you have Googled random things it has led you to this resource.
There's a lot of like, really specific cleaning for Lolita fashion, or problems that you might
have like running into ink in your dresses. There's also a lot of helpful information on
the history of Lolita, and specific items being explained. it's just like the nitty
gritty resource for Lolita fashion. If there's any resources that you
use that I haven't mentioned in this video, please let me know.
Let's share all of this information so that Lolitas can learn and try and grow.
Now it's time to research and learn and soak it all in. As always, stay lovely.
You are going to be able to tell that I filmed this out of order, because I have a Band-Aid
on my thumb in this part, because setting up my microphone here, the arm injured me.
I wanted it to look like I was sitting in front of a fire, you know,
like create that sort of old-timey library feel. But I don't know how to work this fireplace,
and I'm actually afraid of fire, so I didn't want to mess with it and try.
It's 2023 and I still use my Wii Fit, okay? I love the Wii