Tips for Off-Brand and Handmade Lolita

Hello! So maybe I'm starting my lolita blog series a bit backwards, given that this is something of an advanced topic, but here we are anyway. 

Recently I wore one of my favorite coords, which just so happens to have 0 brand items. Nope, not even Bodyline! Scandalous, I know. It's a difficult thing to pull off, but it can be done, so I wanted to give a little breakdown of my coord and how I made it work. Since this is a specific coord, this is not exactly a one-size-fits-all tutorial, but I hope it'll grant some insight nonetheless.

The most important things to keep in mind when making or buying your pieces, imo, are the following:

• Harmony: Every piece of your coord should flow together and feel deliberate. Too much of one color here, not enough detail there, and so forth, and it won't look as good.
• Material: Recently, I was at a renaissance faire, and I saw someone wearing an ouji coord. I was so excited! ...Until I got closer and saw the blinding polyester shine and printed-on details, and realized they were in fact, a Genshin Impact cosplayer. This isn't to shame Genshin cosplayers, but that's not what we're going for, right? So be selective in your materials.
• Detail: This is what lolita's all about. No part of your coord should be particularly boring to look at. This isn't to say that everything should be loud and busy, necessarily! And of course, it may depend on the occasion- sometimes you might want to do something a bit more casual, and that's ok. But you'll notice that even more simplistic lolita brand pieces have things like nicely textured material or a nicely tailored cut. 

Now, the foundation of any lolita coord is the main piece- that is, the skirt, JSK, or OP. That naturally means that this is going to be THE single most important item to get correct, or else it just ain't gonna work; you could have the most beautiful blouse and meticulously curated accessories, but if you're wearing an ugly Hot Topic dress, you might still miss the mark. And I will be honest, loliable main pieces are extremely difficult to find off-brand. 

Naturally, if you're doing something handmade, you have an advantage in that you can make it exactly how you want (with regard to your own limits in skill/time/budget, ofc). This time my main piece will be one of my own handmade skirts, so let's take a look and see what choices I made in designing it to help make it truly lolita.

(A quick note: See how rumpled the skirt looks? It’s freshly washed, and hadn’t been ironed yet when I took the photos. Always iron or steam your garments before wearing, it makes a huge difference. I ironed this skirt after taking the photos.)

The print is one I designed myself, inspired by the Rose of Versailles. (If you don’t know what that is, look it up, it’s such an icon.) I won’t go into too much detail here since designing lolita prints is a whole big topic in and of itself, but I’ll give a brief summary: When designing the print, I made sure to do plenty of research, looking at existing lolita prints that had similar elements to what I had in mind. In some cases, I took a tape measure to garments from my own closet to get a better sense of scale. Keeping in mind things like proportion, color, level of detail, choice of motifs, and so forth helped me to get things right. It took a fair bit of fine-tuning, but in the end, I think it came out nice.

As far as producing the physical fabric goes, I used a fabric print-on-demand service called Spoonflower. (If you’re curious, the print is available there under the name “Destiny of a Rose” and comes in four colorways.) Spoonflower offers a fairly wide variety of different fabric types, so I had some choices to make. If you’d like to learn more about that, 20 Dollar Lolita has a post on it here, although it’s a bit outdated at this point but it’s not a huge deal.

In my case, I chose the cotton twill. This is a fairly common material in lolita in general, and since I’m using the blue colorway, I wanted to use a relatively sturdy fabric to reflect the character of Oscar de Jarjayes. If I were using, say, the cream x pink colorway (which is inspired by Marie Antoinette), I probably would have gone with the poly crepe de chine, which I’ve used before for my Castlevania JSK.

Now, let’s take a look at the construction and details. Like arguably the majority of lolita skirts, it’s a rectangle skirt; what this means is that the body of the skirt is a wide rectangle, calculated to fit over a petticoat, with the top edge gathered into the waistband. (A good rule of thumb is that your skirt width should be about 3x your waist measurement.) I chose to do a corset skirt, so the waistband is extra tall. Some corset skirts have boning in them, but since this one is a heavy material, I dedicated that the doubled-up material within the seam allowance would be sufficient to keep its shape.

To add detail, I decided to employ a common lolita trick of sandwiching trim within certain seams- in my case I used rickrack, specifically the top of the waistband, and the front waistband seams. At the bottom of the skirt, I added a wide lace trim. Since gold is an accent color in the print, and can be seen on the trim of Oscar’s uniform, I chose this as the color for all my trim. To further invoke Oscar with a hint of military style, I added two sets of decorative gold and white buttons joined by a delicate gold chain at the front of the waistband. 

I would like you to take a minute and think about what the waistband would look like if the buttons and chain weren’t there. Kinda boring, right? Not much going on. Just some stripes. With a wide waistband, because you have a wide open space like that, it’s always a good idea to put something on the front; buttons are one possibility, but bows or corset lacing are also common. Understand what I was getting at earlier in regards to detail? If not, that’s ok. You’ll get a sense of it the more you engage with lolita design.

Now that we’ve got our main piece, let’s talk about the next most important item, the blouse.

This was originally an H&M blouse, which I modified to make it more lolita. It took a full day of running around the mall before I found a blouse suitable for my needs! So, why did I choose this one? Let’s take a look at what it looked like before I modified it. 

I knew I wanted a white blouse, with short sleeves since it’s summer. The gauze material of this blouse not only keeps it cool and comfortable, but also adds a lot of visual interest, compared to if it were a plain weave. It’s long enough to tuck into a skirt, and the standing collar, ruffled cap sleeves, and the ruffle on the collar and placket are certainly something you might see in lolita. Jackpot! But it’s still not as exquisite as many lolita blouses. So, what modifications did I make to kick it up a notch?

The first thing I did was remove the plain white buttons and add some round, opalescent ones. Replacing buttons with nicer ones is always a good way to elevate an off-the-rack garment. After that, I added white lace to the hem of the sleeves, and around the base of the neck. This adds more detail and a more elegant, delicate feel.

Here’s what the skirt and blouse look like together.

I think we’ve got a solid foundation. Now it’s time to accessorize! So let’s see what we’ve got. This is where detail and harmony really come together to make a coord shine.

For hair accessories, I’ve got a blue bow made from the same fabric and trim as the skirt, a white flower crown from Claire’s, and some blood-stained white roses I made out of the margins from a Spoonflower crepe de chine fabric from a different project. 

Now, flower crowns in lolita can be a bit tricky; like many accessories, you can’t simply slap it on any coord willy-nilly, but flower crowns are a particular danger because they were so trendy in the mid-2010s or so. Care must be taken to avoid looking like the hypothetical Tumblr girl or whatever. With this coord, the skirt already has a strong floral motif, so a flower crown fits in in that regard. I chose this one specifically not only for the color, but also because it has some additional details: a gold chain and a pearl, both of which are motifs on the skirt as well. It’s a good match. 

As for the bloody roses, I’ll use them to fill in some of the gaps in the flower crown. Since they're on clips, I can easily remove them if I ever want to use this flower crown for a less gory coord. Remember, versatility saves money!

Next, let's look at other accessories.

The pearl bracelet and the gold and crystal bracelet are from Rainbow, and the one with the red roses was made by my brother. The ribbon came from Michael’s and is the same as the ribbon I used for the back lacing on the skirt. The rose is handmade like the other four, though I left this one unpainted. I’ve got two choices for earrings: glittery red guillotines (purchased from a local artist), and gold hoops with red roses (from Forever 21 if memory serves correctly). While I adore the guillotines, they’re less lolita-looking and a bit on the nose, so I decided to go for the hoops instead this time around; the blood stained roses ought to already get the message across pretty clearly, lmao.

Here’s how things look with the accessories. I also did my makeup at this point, though it’s my strong personal belief that makeup is not required for lolita. It can certainly enhance a coord, sure, but I don’t think any coord looks bad without makeup, so whether or not to wear any is entirely up to you. I enjoy being glittery, so I personally often wear eyeshadow and lipstick, though I don’t use foundation or concealer or anything like that. But I digress- here’s the look.

Finally, time for shoes and legwear.

The socks came from… Maybe Forever 21? I forget. The shoes are a pair of ballet flats I’ve had for a long time, and they originally looked quite different. I painted them gold using fabric ink, and changed out the laces for blue ribbons, adding pearls and gold beads between them to further tie in the shoes with the details of the skirt. 

By the way, here’s what the shoes looked like before I painted them. Quite the transformation, don’t you think?

Now that everything’s picked out, let’s see the full coord! What do you think?

And there we have it, a complete no-brand coord. While all the choices I’ve made are unique to this coord, I nonetheless hope that this dive into my thought process will be enlightening to beginner lolitas, or even veterans looking to polish up their coording skills. Hope you enjoyed, please let me know if you have any questions!