Musings on My Lolidrobe

I’ve had a look at my Lolidrobe a while back and two thoughts crossed my mind. The first one was “God, I need more room, how I wish I could have a separate room just for Lolita”. The second one was simply: “Wow, I’ve been very lucky”.

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Not just the basic kind of lucky where I can indulge in a hobby such as Lolita fashion, although I think about that quite often as well. But lucky in the sense that the majority of my Lolita main pieces are my dream dresses.

A wardrobe full of just dream dresses is something that many Lolitas really wish for, no doubt. There are plenty of reasons why this doesn’t always happen: dream dresses being unattainable, wanting to participate in the fashion so much that exercising restraint on wallet is difficult, simply too many bargains around, finding something that you really like although wouldn’t call a dream dress, and a whole tonne of other ones.

At the moment I own 13 main pieces: 2 skirts, 1 OP and 10 JSKs, with two more JSKs pending (one’s with my shopping service waiting for socks to be released and the other one’s a Taobao reserve waiting to be made and shipped out). Out of all 15 of those items only 4 are not my dream pieces, although 2 of those I have very strong feelings for and wouldn’t want to part with. So that’s good 84% of my Lolidrobe that is made up of dream items, and that really is a lot and a reason to feel lucky.

There’s no shadow of a doubt that most of those weren’t easy to obtain – in fact, only those last two items I could safely say were fairly effortless although still somewhat stressful as I was worried about them selling out. However, most of the other ones, especially the big brand pieces, involved months of fruitless searches on every single used clothing website that I know of every single day. I’m not kidding: Closet Child, Maiden Clothing, Usagi Youhinten, Wunderwelt, Violet Blue, Tokyo Alice, Lolita Desu, Lacemarket, Mbok, Yahoo Auctions, and recently Frill and, when I remember, Mercari as well – in that order (it’s a routine by now). All of this being in addition to Facebook sales, where I set myself notifications for everything that’s posted in all 6 sales groups. Sometimes there’d be nothing for months on end, but once I had two dream dresses appear within a few days, maybe a week of each other and I had to make decisions quickly.

Let’s not forget the cost either. I’ve been cursed with an expensive taste in popular prints, so a lot of my dream dresses cost me more than they originally retailed for. And even if they didn’t, for example like with Fantasy Theater, getting them involved months of careful saving and trying to keep myself motivated so that I wouldn’t give in to temptations to spend on other things. We all know that Lolita is an expensive fashion and don’t expect dream dresses to come cheap, ever, so the fact that I’ve managed to accumulate so many, including some very popular releases, is mind-blowing when I actually stop to think about it.

Now I’m in a position where I’m able to indulge in Lolita a lot more as I’m working full time and have recently received a pay rise as well. But although this means that I could get a new brand release if I wanted to, old habits die hard and I’m still quite reluctant to just buy everything I like the look of – even some of the new releases I keep coming back to or the smaller builder pieces. Having taken the “buy only the things you really love and desire beyond words” approach to Lolita so far, as well as having somewhat established my style, preferred colours and cuts, and what other pieces I’m missing, accepting that I could just splurge on impulse buys if I wanted to comes surprisingly hard

In a way, that’s not a bad approach, as you get to love each piece properly and make yourself happy with things that made up your dreams not that long ago. It’s less good when trying to become a daily Lolita and finding it hard to fall in love with solid colour pieces, but I don’t think I’m quite at that stage yet.

At the same time, I think this way is that little bit more exciting. I don’t know what my next main piece purchase will be, even if I can suspect that it’ll blow my mind somehow and will make my eyes turn into two massive saucers. And I can be sure that it will bring me a lot of excitement and joy because it will be something that I anticipate a lot (at least before I have to figure out where to squeeze it in my already packed wardrobe). And that is quite a lovely thought to have, don’t you think?

Is your Lolidrobe full of mostly dream dresses or are you still working on that? I’d love to hear from you (and link me your wardrobe post pictures too, if you can)!



* Photo in the thumb taken from http://reinodemorango.blogspot.co.uk
** All photos taken from Lolibrary.org