How Do You Approach Your Coords?

Here’s another loose thought that has been at the back of my mind for some time. When I read more about how other people coordinate their pieces, their thought processes behind each choice, I noticed two distinct categories that lolitas tend to fall into. People either go down the route of polishing each main piece’s coordinate until its final form or the route of making as many different coordinates with each main piece as possible. And today I would like to stop and dwell a little bit more on that.

Personally, as you probably gathered, I am the latter kind. To me coming up with new ways to wear the same dress is exciting and it allows me to experiment with creative self-expression. This isn’t to say that I am totally against re-wearing outfits. I’m not, certainly not in principle. But I am also very aware of how many individual smaller pieces I own, so wearing different outfits each time forces me to use what I have at least that little bit more evenly instead of constantly reaching for the same couple of favourites. As such it can sometimes feel like I don’t have the time to re-wear lolita coords because there are all these other ideas that I have in my coord bank that I could’ve worn just as easily as re-wear a past outfit.

Just look at August if you really need proof that I am Team Many Outfits.

From my perspective, going down the ultimate polishing of each coordinate route seemed like something only newer lolitas do. When you have fewer pieces and keep adding things, it’s sensible to focus on improving the outfits you do have until you are completely happy with them, that’s the smart way that most of us would advise newbies to do, often based on our own experience of not doing exactly that. That is until I started reading Kyra’s blog more. She is far from a newbie lolita and continues to document her outfits not only through the “this is what I wore” lens, but also evaluates what she liked and what could be improved about each coord. Moreover, she regularly does a ‘one year on’ look at the same outfit, comparing a coord from a year prior, talking about what changed and why. There is nothing newbie-like about her reflection on what she wears, in fact, it reads as the sort of very advanced responsible behaviour all lolitas should continue to cultivate. If you haven’t read her blog at all, I highly recommend it, what I wrote will make more sense if you’ve read at least a couple.

Those blog posts regularly get me thinking on why I don’t do the same. Yes, wanting to wear my clothes as frequently and fairly as possible is an important factor. Having said this, I enjoy having a timeline snapshot of coords with each dress that I add to my AYWi30C posts. People like to track progress and see how they improved over time. It’s also good to reflect on the things that we wear and consider what worked and what hasn’t. Whilst I do partly subscribe to the idea that dressing in clothes isn’t an objectively measurable hobby (like sports may be where you can track how much longer/faster you are running and that is kind of the goal to constantly improve), I also don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting your outfits to be better because you yourself aren’t completely happy with the outcome. But for all the times that I do say “I’d change this” or “this could be better”, it’s not often that I actually go through with those thoughts, at least not through wearing the same outfit again with the changes mentioned.

This is from the last AYWi30C post and with my 2nd lolita JSK ever. Seeing both the improvements and the variety with just this one dress is quite inspiring, as well as lets me see what things I haven't yet done.

Now that I am wearing lolita more often than ever, the idea of rewearing outfits comes to my mind somewhat more often. With the increase in casual coords, I think more often about which outfits I could do again easily once we do actually get back to the office (side note: a prospect more imminent than I would like, though of course nothing is said out loud with any degree of certainty). In those cases, where I would end up wearing the same outfit regularly, wouldn’t it make sense to evaluate it each time and tweak until I had a version I was genuinely happy to keep wearing so often?

Though if I’m completely honest, those thoughts are coming from the rational part of my brain. When I listen to my heart, it wants to keep trying new things and keep proving that the same dress can yield multiple distinct looks. At the same time I doubt that the appeal of those detailed reviews and polishing of the same coord until it is in its best version will stop appealing to me just because I realised my heart wants variety. However, it certainly made for an interesting introspective look.

Could some of these make it to my work wardrobe? The outer two could as there are enough elements I could simply add once I got to the office. But for the most part I'd rather think of something new with these pieces.

And I’m curious to see where other people are at with their approach to coords. Are you Team Many Outfits or Team Perfect Outfit? Have you ever even thought about trying out the other approach? Why do you think you lean into this one instead of the other? It’d be interesting if we could identify whether there is a strong preference amongst lolitas for one or the other!