Starting with Solids: the Evolution of an Advice

Certain ideas about our fashion continue to be passed down as either rules or good advice without much regard for how the fashion itself has changed over the years. One of those is the notion that solid colour pieces are easier to coordinate. I still occasionally see this either being given to new lolitas as advice or them referencing it (e.g. by starting a question with “I know that I should start with a solid dress, but…” etc.). Whilst many of us may understand that this doesn’t hold as much value these days, it’s never been clearly explained why, how or even when this idea started to change. This is the tangled piece of yarn that I would very much like to untangle a bit now because this is something that I have struggled with myself.

The Early Days of Lolita

Like with so many other things, we have to start at the beginning. And the fact is that in its earliest form lolita fashion was a much simpler look. Saying that prints were not around would be a big exaggeration, as we have plenty of documented instances of patterned pieces appearing, of appliques being used, novelty fabrics, screen printing etc. However, the dominant look for many of the early years was that of a solid colour piece or one with a simple, commercially available pattern (such as tartans, florals, polka dots etc.) with far more focus on adding details structurally and/or texturally through base fabrics and added trims.

However, main pieces aside, the dominant form of styling in those early days relied on what we would now consider basics. Instead of reaching for printed legwear or patterned blouses, brands and wearers on the streets alike opted for builder pieces which also gained their detail from things like fabric textures, laces, pintucks, gathers etc. Of course, people still had jewellery of various forms to add however they pleased, but the clothing itself was simple and the availability of lolita-specific builder items like socks and blouses also tended to be solid colour items, usually in white, ivory and black to match the most commonly used trim colours.

BtSSB ad and a street snap, both from GLB vol. 17 (March 2005), courtesy of LolitaHistory.com.
When coordinating was more about getting things with the right look and detail, one really didn't need much more than a solid coloured main piece.

With this in mind, getting into lolita could not seem any easier - anyone could find a white blouse or sew some lace to plain knee high socks. There’s no doubt that together with limited access to items directly from Japan this meant that the community outside of Japan had a much longer ‘ita phase’, as they were making do with what they could get their hands on. Nonetheless, such an environment created a culture of telling new lolitas to get a solid coloured piece. It was a solid piece of advice (all the pun intended) because it really was all that coordinating required at the time and it helped one to achieve versatility with the minimum number of items possible.

The Rise of Prints and the Rise of OTT Sweet

As prints started to take over, they introduced a different aspect to creating balance within an outfit. Coordinating grew from finding items complimentary to the solid or patterned piece to finding items that work with the print, which in itself introduced a handful more colours into the mix. And like with everything new, it took the community a bit of time to wrap its head around the whole idea of coordinating prints. This meant sticking to the same solid coloured basics, once again ensuring versatility with very few additions. Because of this, the mindset remained that solid coloured main pieces were easier to style because there really was little need for too many extras, since there weren’t any other additional colours to have to keep in mind, which the prints included.

It’s worth noting here that the rise of prints, whilst not limited to sweet lolita, was the most prominent in that substyle. You can see a shift in the dominant look of the fashion in the GLBs from around issue 23 as border prints became more common and even the featured street snaps started to show more pastel and lighter coloured outfits compared to the darker, more sombre and more gothic ones from the earlier issues. Whether in ads or on street snaps, the styling tended to remain simple, but the further in time one goes, the more we can see how the introduction of all these lighter colours affected the style, e.g. by seeing more shoes in colours from the prints of the dresses as opposed to sticking to the versatile white, black or brown.

Angelic Pretty ad and a street snap, both from GLB vol. 42 (winter 2011), courtesy of LolitaHistory.com.
If you flick through this issue, you will see simpler looks next to these iconic sweet ones, but far fewer of them than in the earlier volumes.

This culminated with the OTT Sweet era when coordinating involved not just balancing the colours, but also a multitude of accessories. Whilst the OTT look with a border printed dress was more impactful, it was still possible to create it using a solid main piece. The advantage of a solid dress therefore became that of being able to add whatever other colours or themes one wanted instead of being bound by the theme of the print. Despite the influence of decora fashion at that time, which meant that colours were often more important than the shape or the theme of the accessories, with time it became more common to advise others to stick to what the print dictated thematically. This maintained the validity of the advice that solids were easier to coordinate, whilst also cementing their usefulness within a lolita’s wardrobe as a piece that would be more versatile by virtue of lending itself to more casual, day-to-day styling instead of being seemingly limited to the OTT looks.

The Post-2012 Age of Excess

Even as OTT Sweet’s heyday faded, it left a legacy that changed the landscape of lolita fashion. Between the brief reign of OTT Classic and the much longer onset of sweet-classic finding its niche, prints had come to stay and dominate the look, bringing with it a set of expectations that weren’t there in the fashion’s earliest days. The community began to view colour matching as crucial, bemoaning the endless shades of pastels, where before they only needed to at most match the blouse and socks to the colour of the dress’ lace. Even as looks started toning down again from their OTT height, the boundary of what was casual lolita and what was a standard coordinate had shifted more towards the side that relied on accessorising. In other words, what would have been a complete and quite dressed up coord back in 2002 was now considered very casual and minimal, on top of being viewed as dated.
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As a result of this the lolita community seems to have forgotten a little how to coordinate non-printed dresses. Without a print to rely on for secondary colours or for themes, suddenly wearing a solid dress felt limiting. Moreover, the mindset of colours having to match allowed for only two coordinating options: a ‘boring’ one with basics in the substyle’s neutral colours or an ‘impossible’ monochrome one with impeccably perfect colour matches. Sure, there is a lot that can be done simply with different cuts, but the age of excess also brought with it the notion that one should have lots of different colour options rather than different cuts, since OTT Sweet placed such big focus on playing with the print’s colours.

If you look on Lolibrary at JSKs released in 2016, out of 36 pages in total only 8 are filled with JSKs tagged as solids. Prints of all forms have dominated the landscape of the fashion by the time OTT Sweet had calmed down.

To put it another way, as the simpler look became less desirable in sweet lolita and solid dresses became more synonymous with the other substyles, which were less visible than sweet, the advice of starting with a solid coloured dress started to become less and less relevant. The community has also learnt how to coordinate prints by then and found that a multitude of ‘sins’ can be hidden in plain sight, from mismatched shades working through sandwiching to slightly less detailed builder pieces being fine since the print steals most of the attention. Suddenly creating an interesting coordinate with a non-printed main piece became the challenge and a skill that only the seasoned lolitas had as seemingly everything around us was printed. By that logic, making a good coordinate with a solid main piece must have required additional layers, as otherwise the outfit would have been too casual to be lolita.

This isn’t to say that this way of thinking was or is true. However, like with anything, the dominant look tends to drown out the fringes. Moreover, with the Western community having established a firm online presence by then, as well as having gained reliable shopping sources of the fashion directly from its creators, the dominant look became even more visible. There were still individuals that were either avoiding having an online presence altogether or who were not favoured by social media algorithms, but both those looking to get into lolita fashion and those already engaging with that content were finding pretty similar looks in their searches and feeds. And as we started to see fewer examples of both more day-to-day outfits and of non-OTT solid coloured dresses, coordinating them well for the first time started to become harder than coordinating prints by depriving us of more reference material, as well as the crutch that is a print which we grew to rely on.

Oldschool’s Return Into Favours

We are now living in times when the appeal of oldschool lolita has once again been drawing people back in. For a few years leading up to the pandemic the simpler looks have offered both a gentler introduction to the fashion and a bit of a break for those who have been into it for several years now and may have started to feel the pressure to always look their Instagram best. Furthered by the pandemic, where the time available to dress up was countered by a collective desire for comfort, oldschool lolita with its simpler stylings and bigger reliance on solid coloured or simple patterned pieces, as well as favouring structural details over prints, re-entered the scene in a way that was more than just a small group of die hard fans.

However, whilst this is a welcome break and a good re-introduction to the idea that coordinates don’t always have to be extremely elaborate to be objectively well put together, it doesn’t seem enough to overturn the dominance of prints and all the ideas that were absorbed along with their prevalence. The community understands that oldschool lolita doesn’t need complicated styling and that solids are very common within that look, but that’s just oldschool. Sweet lolita is still treated the same way as before, as are gothic and classic, as evidenced for example by some of the responses to the announcement of Meta’s 2022 sailor series calling it too simple. The solid coloured pieces being released now, if they don’t follow an oldschool-inspired look, tend to to be quite OTT and more tea party appropriate, while everything in between the two gets a bit forgotten and left out, if not outright called too expensive for what it is. Personal tastes and opinions aside, AP’s Romantic Tiered JSK and Pretty Frill JSK have both sold out, whereas their Black Lacy Heart JSK is still fully in stock and the Lovely Organdy JSK is fully in stock in all but one colourway at the time of writing.

I did say personal tastes aside, but you can see how the top two not only are oldschool-appropriate, but simply look to have more bang for your buck than the bottom two.

And even though there are plenty of members of our community who create amazing outfits with solid coloured main pieces that aren’t oldschool or tea party-level OTT, it’s so easy to forget that they are pretty experienced in putting lolita coordinates together. After years of building up a wardrobe and playing with it, finding out how to successfully coordinate a solid piece is much easier than when everything is new and limited. Pieces which I would have struggled with back when I was starting out, like Victorian Maiden’s Shirring Frill JSK, I not only navigate with confidence, but have the resources to create varying looks without either sacrificing interest or hiding the entirety of the dress under overlays [LINK]. Now I understand where a lot of people may be coming from with the reluctance to spend brand new brand piece money on a solid dress that seems too simple because I’ve been there myself and said the exact same things once. Everyone is allowed to spend their money however they see fit and that is a different argument altogether. But considering that the dominant look of lolita fashion these days is that of printed pieces, even though what we once knew as a happy pack set with a solid dress would be a perfect first coord, I understand that when someone says they want to get into lolita fashion, this is rarely what they mean. And as such these days, if anyone asked me, I wouldn’t actively advise a newbie to get a solid main piece as their first ever dress, not unless they expressed explicit interest in that kind of a look in the first place.

Final Words

In this day and age, after 10 solid years of prints dominating the scene and teaching us how to coordinate that, advising someone that solid coloured main pieces are easier to coordinate or to start with them is very dated advice. Whilst it may work for someone actively interested in oldschool lolita, for anyone else it will simply present them with an unnecessary hurdle as they try to balance that with the other prevalent notions like ‘colours must match’ or that ‘an all-white base is a sign of a beginner’. Not that either of those is true, but those of us who have been in the fashion for a bit will know very well the importance of walking before we run, and how explaining that the rules aren’t set in stone to someone too new can result in them making mistakes. But just like we have learnt to move away from some of the other dated advice that we used to frequently dish out to newcomers (such as avoiding black and white entirely), we can unlearn this one too. In this day and age, where the vast majority of reference pictures that a new lolita will see will involve printed pieces, advising them to start with a solid coloured one simply isn’t doing them much of a favour.