Musings on J-Fashion Blogs with Bibliotheca

Even though it may not always seem like it, there are good things coming out of this extended period of social isolation that we’re going through. Whilst IRL interactions and opportunities for socialising have gone dramatically down, many communities joined forces online to bring us closer together that way. Bay Area Kei, who to date have organised seven large virtual J-fashion events with an eight one on the way, are one of the key figures in fostering this community spirit.

That is why when they created Bibliotheca, a space dedicated to promoting J-fashion bloggers and providing them with a community of their own, I was very excited. I cannot stress this enough how honoured I am to have been accepted as an affiliated blogger amongst so many other fine writers, whose opinions and points of view I value and respect. It would’ve been a terrible faux pas on my part to not engage with the monthly theme Bibliotheca sets up and while introductions after five years of active blogging here would be somewhat odd, there is never a bad time to ponder blogging at large through a lens of lolita/J-fashion blogging. So let’s talk about that, shall we?

@bread.first.search, who is both one of the affiliated Bibliotheca bloggers and a member of the Bay Area Kei team, has very kindly put together a list of questions that we could answer in our posts. All of which made me realise that up until that point I have been massively overthinking the monthly theme. However, it quickly became clear that not all of this overthinking was down to just the way my brain works. For all the tendency to think too much and overcomplicate what could happily remain simple, the contrast between what I thought was expected and the picture painted by the prompt questions reflect my very thoughts on the state of J-fashion blogging and wider media today.

For a bit of personal context, I have been blogging in some way or another since around the age of 12, back when it was new and trendy, and everyone wanted in. To my utter dismay, the Wayback Machine still has the very first blog that I seriously invested myself in, in all its head-achingly glitter gif-y glory (no, I’m not subjecting your eyes to that). Besides anything before that, the only time in my life when I wasn’t blogging at all was roughly 2 years across 2014 and 2015 when I focused on finishing my degree. But by the end of 2015 it literally felt like I had a hole in my chest, like something important was missing from my life and I wanted to blog again - and doing so about lolita fashion filled that void.

The whole beauty of blogging, both back then and now, is that you can talk about anything in the world that you want. Before the rise of visual and audiovisual social media platforms, text dominated the internet through blogs and forums. That is where we found communities of like-minded people, entertained ourselves, often made friends (some of whom may still be big parts of our lives). This is also what I like about blogging to this day. The freedom to write about anything at all means that every blog is different and an insight into the individual who creates it. What they choose to write about, how they approach that topic, how they embellish their corner of the internet, the way they interact with the people who comment on it - all of this says a lot about a person.

Whether it's the layout of your Instagram feed or that of your blog, these are digital spaces that we curate in ways that we find pleasing. And that says a lot about us already, as people and as creators.

As far as this relates to J-fashion, although I wasn’t actively wearing lolita in the original heyday of lolita blogs, it seems to me that early blogging and early J-fashion blogging share that same personal aspect. When I first heard of blogs in general, they were explained to me as online diaries and I think many of us treated them quite like so. They were about us, our thoughts, lives, things that somehow mattered to us. With fashion it was about what we wore, what we bought, what we wished for, what we were excited for, and eventually, as communities centred around those fashions grew, about the people we met who share our passion.

This personal aspect of blogging never really left, but the comparably greater accessibility of platforms like Instagram and later YouTube certainly pushed the written word aside. Fashion is visual and people were more interested in seeing what we were wearing than reading about the why, the where, and the how. With time we got used to listening more than we were used to reading, so videos took over as the long form of choice, until blogging started to seem like a bit of an “elder millennial” thing to do.

At the same time, over this time, the lolita fashion community has lost its biggest piece of printed media: the Gothic and Lolita Bible magazine, which went out of print in 2017. Even though for the non-Japanese speakers this was still more of a picture book to flick through, with the help of volunteer translators and/or constantly improving translator apps people were able to access the articles too. Various other magazines have come and gone, trying to fill the void left by the GLB, with Girlism coming the closest thanks to the popularity of lolita fashion in China - but the Western community, by now unignorable in numbers, didn’t want to be left out.

There's something about written word that lends legitimacy to our fashion in ways that video or photographic content doesn't.

Though it still took until the onset of the pandemic for the Western community to realise that. Until 2020 we’ve been too preoccupied with organising events, but once there were no events to go to, what else could one do? Moreover, by that point the most hardcore of lolita fashion veterans were in it for 20+ years and they weren’t interested in another Lolita 101 or looking at coord pictures that they were getting via Instagram anyway. And so blogging has made a comeback - with an upgrade. Amidst all the social changes that 2020 triggered, people in the J-fashion community have found themselves engaging with in-depth long form content. Virtual events were filled with panels and presentations that are positively academic in nature rather than merely entertaining, expanding our knowledge and challenging our views. But events only come round every so often, which led the way for blogs to once again fill up our free time.

Some of the blogs that I personally look up to these days continue to offer posts that are crucial, analytical, educational, well researched, challenging. I will still just as happily read about what someone wore and what they did while they wore it, neither will I scoff at a review or a crafting tutorial. Yet I find that it’s the more meaningful posts that stay with me. Lucy May’s writing on R. R. Memorandum’s blog never fails to stop me in my tracks to think about the topic, despite the fact that most of it is about oldschool lolita which I’m not necessarily keen on. Kawaii Riot shows me the side of J-fashion that as a white woman I’ve been privileged to choose to whether I even notice and teaches me how to do better and be better, so that everyone can enjoy this fashion and its community safely. Recently I’ve been loving thoughtful pieces by Bunny at Your Bunny Valentine where she looks at our fashion and its community through a lens of intersectionality backed with knowledge from areas that I often have little knowledge of like art history. All of this on top of a slow rise of digital and printed media created by bottom-up by members of our own community, like The Kei Club or JBTK zines, which have given us a balance of the GLB flavour with engaging reads that matter to us as the Western J-fashion wearers ourselves.

Over time of seeing pieces like this be promoted, shared and discussed - and very rightfully so, as they deserve it - it’s no wonder that in my head I have bigged up the contribution that I needed to submit for Bibliotheca’s first round of monthly theme posts. Times have changed and while each blog out there still carries a piece of its creator in every published word, the audience that we write for has changed. The advent of one type of blogging doesn’t necessarily mean the demise of another and I doubt that the space for the reviews, the coordinate posts, the event reports, the fun and lighthearted content that most lolita blogs have started out with will ever disappear. At the same time, the effects of the last year or so, with so many more written pieces that require active engagement and not just passive reading, will continue to influence blogging for quite some time to come. It’s very likely that blogging will never regain the popularity it enjoyed in the early days of J-fashion establishing itself outside of Japan - the popularity of platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok is far too big for that to happen. But I’m confident that it will continue to enrich the available content for people to enjoy in ways that go beyond hedonistic pleasures, fostering communities that are stronger, bound together not only by a common interest, but also by virtue of shared values on what it is to be into J-fashion in the 2020s.