This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).
If you don’t know anything about lolita fashion, let me give you a quick primer. Lolita is a style of Japanese street fashion originating in 1970s Harajuku. While the name might squick Westerners, the fashion has nothing to do with that awful pedophilic book. The style actually originates from a feminist rebellion by young women against societal and parental expectations that they should dress and act a certain way in order to attract a husband. Instead, early lolitas created clothing which was heavily influenced by cutesy little girl’s styles in order to dissuade men from approaching them. These days, lolita is worn around the world. Most people only wear it for special occasions like meetups with other lolitas and outings. They have lolita events at conventions, sponsored tea parties, and a bustling online buy/sell community.
The fashion itself focuses on a few key elements: poofy dresses or skirts, modest cuts with minimal skin showing, lace/ruffles/frills, and carefully coordinated looks where every element matches. There are plenty of sub-styles but the most popular are sweet, classic, and gothic. Sweet lolita is full of pastel colors, baby animal motifs, sweet foods, and fluffy stuff. Classic looks like a Victorian doll, using more subdued color palettes and simple or older-looking prints. Gothic focuses on black or very dark colors, crosses, bats, and spikes, while still maintaining the key elements of the overall style. There’s other sub-styles too, like wa-lolita, pirate lolita, military lolita, and country lolita, but most follow one of the main three styles.
Before I begin this story, I should familiarize you with the idea of ‘brand’ or ‘burando’. Brand is the term used when referring to items made by Japanese lolita companies like Angelic Pretty (AP), Baby the Stars Shine Bright (BtSSB), Alice and the Pirates (AatP), Metamorphose (Meta) and Innocent World (IW). Lolita isn’t cheap to buy and brand items tend to be the most expensive. A new release dress from AP often runs around US$550. They also tend to have very small sizing, especially in the bust. Secondhand brand dresses can be just as expensive depending on how rare the style is. Prior to rerelease, the AP print Cat’s Teaparty was going for upwards of 1k secondhand due to the rarity and desirability. People get insane about finding their dream dress and are willing to pay prices which seem ridiculous to those not involved in the fashion. There are cheaper options out there, especially Bodyline (which has some juicy drama I’ll write about in a post soon) and Taobao, but some people pride themselves on being labeled ‘brand whores’ for only ever wearing brand items.
Kelly Eden and the $1,500 Dress
If you’re not familiar with Kelly Eden, she’s a cosplayer, model, YouTuber, massive weeaboo, and subject of much drama. She’s claimed to be the most kawaii person in the United States, said that her video about Sailor Moon makeup made the price go up, sold all of her Hello Kitty merch after Sanrio refused to sponsor her, and claimed Disney was copying her look in one of their shows. Her house is adorable but all in all she has a history of entitlement and spoiled behaviour.
Back in 2017, Kelly went on a trip to Japan to do some work on a TV show. While she was there, she and her friends decided to hit up Akihabara, a very popular Japanese shopping district. This isn’t your average western shopping center with a Banana Republic and Annie Anne’s Pretzels. It’s multiple buildings across many stories chock full of electronics, games, collectibles, toys, trading cards - basically the dream of every Japanese media collector and gadget geek. It also hosts department stores with some niche street fashion brands, including the main store of Angelic Pretty, the most widely known and popular lolita brand in the world.
Kelly and her entourage decided to visit the AP store for some shopping. Her group wanders the store until she hits upon The Dress. The Dress is gorgeous, an elaborate pink number dripping in ruffles and bows. It’s every bit an over the top sweet lolita dress. After telling her friend she thinks it must be expensive, her friend converts the yen price on the fly, saying that it’s $148. $148. When the average price of a brand new AP dress is around $550. In her later video, Kelly claims that she knows the average price of an AP dress and that she assumed it was on sale. AP is rarely, if ever, on sale. She asks to try it on and the shop staff decline. Note that this is common in lolita when an item is particularly expensive. They don’t want to risk the dress being ruined by someone while they’re trying it.
Kelly has a large chest, much larger than what is typically accommodated by brand dresses, and says she isn’t sure if it would fit her. After debating the price and if it would fit, she decides to purchase the dress, figuring she could just return it if it wound up not fitting her. After all, it’s just $148. She never takes out her phone to convert the price. She never asks shop staff for a conversion. She never considers that AP and other lolita brands have a no returns, no refunds policy. She never asks any questions while handing over her credit card, even after her debit card was declined. She looks directly at the price tag, agrees that it’s $148, and buys it.
That night she gets an email from her bank asking if she tried to make a $1,500 purchase on her debit card in Akihabara earlier in the day. Having never actually significantly considered why the dress she bought was so cheap, she freaks out, says it wasn’t her, and cancels her card. The exact card she’d been holding earlier in the day. In Akihabara. At the time there was supposedly fraud. And which was still in her wallet.
Riiiight.
At long last she finally manages to figure out that the dress she thought she’d bought for a great bargain is actually anything but. It’s not $148. It’s roughly $1500. Ten times the price she thought she’d bought it for. Like any spoiled influencer who realizes they’ve made a grave, grave mistake, she freaks out and demands a refund. A refund from a store where giving refunds is Not A Thing They Do. Ever. Note The Emphasis Here.
Thing is, as I said in the intro to this post, there is a bustling secondhand lolita market. Brand new dresses can regularly go for nearly the same price online as in store simply because they’re easier to buy or because the release sold out. Kelly also has a sizable fanbase which is already known for buying her spare stuff and would likely have zero problems getting someone to buy this expensive dress from her. But either she doesn’t know this or she doesn’t consider it, because she marches down to the store after they say over the phone that they won’t return it.
The store obviously isn’t happy to see her. They know why she’s here. She has a translator go back and forth with the store manager, demanding to return it, telling them she’s not leaving until she has her money back. Dresses sold at these stores can’t have any flaws or damage at all, so the moment it leaves the store, while it could be sold second-hand, they can’t take it back and sell it again. The store staff have to thoroughly inspect the whole dress to be sure it isn’t damaged or worn. At long last, after having a fit in the store, they reluctantly agree to return it and she leaves.
After getting back from her trip, Kelly publishes a vlog detailing the whole fiasco. She makes herself out to be the hero who made a mistake and was horribly inconvenienced, but some viewers are quick to point out that she’s definitely not the victim here. Word gets out to the lolita community proper and shit hits the fan. Lolitas, outraged by her mistreating the store staff and talking bad about their favorite brand, bash her to hell and back across social media. A popular snarky lolita YouTuber, Tyler Willis of Last Week Lolita News, does a video ripping her a new one. This is soon followed by another popular YouTube lolita, Lovely Lor, doing a less snarky, more explanatory video also explaining exactly what she did wrong and why everyone is so upset.
Kelly doesn’t take it well. She tweets up a storm, blocks a lot of popular lolita and kawaii influencers including Tyler and Lor, and ultimately, unable to take the criticism, deletes the video. It now only lives on in the clips in Tyler’s video. Lolitas continue to make jokes about her to this day and she has zero respect or credibility in the community.
I have other lolita drama I can write up if there’s interest, like how one brand’s CEO hosted model hunts to find a foreign wife.
Disclaimer
This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.
Read the original here
sounds like every other “entitled influencer” story tbh, but the lolita fashion thing is interesting
these people just sound like brainwashed products of capitalist megacorps.
You might think they are brainwashed, but it’s definitely not “mega corps”. These companies custom design each item, using uniquely sourced materials. Their not like Gucci or something, they arent pumping out millions of items and then artificially keeping supply low by destroying items, the revenue of these companies are in millions, not billions.
This isn’t the case of regular brand/throwaway culture. The materials are all high quality and if taken care of well, the items can be resold at the same value in the future.
What I don’t understand about Angelic Pretty specifically is many women that don’t have the right body size for their clothes will still buy them and then go through an inordinate amount of effort tailoring it so it will actually fit, usually themselves. These projects can be incredibly complicated depending on the dress design, to the point where I start wondering why some of these women with great sewing skills don’t just make the dress themselves from scratch.
I’m not into Lolita fashion myself, but this seems a similar to a discussion I saw about Dungeons & Dragons. Why spend all that time homebrewing a bunch of new systems and rules for situations when there’s another TTRPG system that already has systems and rules for those situations? Because some peoples’ enjoyment comes from tinkering with an existing product, adding onto it. They also get a starting point instead of having to build a whole new TTRPG, design and sew an entire new dress, for themselves. For some, it’s easier to see a pretty dress and change it to fit yourself than it is to think of a design for a pretty dress you’ll love as much. It’s easier to start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and add on rules to tack onto it than to come up with a whole new campaign or rule set yourself, or to come up with the same campaign idea with the other TTRPG’s world as a basis.