Most and Least Expensive Coords
It’s easy to get a little bit obsessed with money when
you’re into lolita fashion. On the one hand we revel in telling each other of
the bargains we’ve found in this luxury fashion. On the other – we often use
the fashion as a currency converter and whilst a £200 dress might be expensive,
it’s not as expensive as a new £400 laptop (which equates to two brand
dresses!). So for a bit of fun I decided to make these two ideas clash and create
the most and least expensive coords out of what I have.
The purpose of this exercise is NOT to create cohesive
outfits. Instead, I literally want to put together all my cheapest and my most
expensive pieces together into coords. If my wardrobe is truly, exceptionally
cohesive, then these will probably work out alright, but I suspect that this
may not be the case. By doing that I want to show that sometimes we obsess over
the cost of things too much from another angle (I’ve already done posts with
cheap all brand coords
and at least one coord under $100)
and that it’s not the item’s price tag that matters, but how you use it. And
underneath I will share the total actual price of each, as in what I actually
spent on that outfit with best estimates where I couldn’t trace the real price.
The Most Expensive Coord
| APCrystal Dream Carnival Tiered JSK | AP Romantic Bright blouse | AP Twinkle Glitter Knit cardigan | AP Drained Cherry OTKs | AP Elegant Doll boots | Triple Fortune bonnet | Metamorphose 3-way bag | |
Total price = £835.16
Everything was going so well with this outfit – up until it
came to the socks! Whilst the pink blouse may not be the most natural choice of
colour for all this, it’s not the worst choice either. A pair of pink socks or
tights is all that’s necessary to balance this outfit out. Granted, with the
sleeves on this blouse I couldn’t actually wear the cardigan, so I probably
should’ve picked one or the other, but I felt it would’ve been cheating to do a
blouse-less outfit (and then I’d have to do the same in the other coord too
since I wanted to keep both outfits using same kinds of pieces).
Generally speaking, the blouse and the socks are the only
things here that really stick out in a negative way. Had I done this post last
month or next there would’ve been a different blouse there (I have an even more
expensive one on the post now), so only the socks would be ruining the coord.
The rest is cohesive and works together quite well. So this outfit goes to show
that just because you bought the most expensive pieces you can find, they don’t
necessarily create a coord together.
The Least Expensive Coord
| Metamorphose Polka Dots Shirring Pinafore JSK | Melt x BtSSB bag | everything else is offbrand | |
Total price = £43.05
For the purpose of fairness, I have excluded Haenuli’s Whipped Cream Kitty JSK from this
challenge. Whilst I did get that dress as a present, so paid nothing, it’s
actual worth is still pretty high, so it wouldn’t be giving the challenge a
fair shot. Besides, if I had used it, it wouldn’t change any of the other
items, so you can easily imagine what the coord would look like with another
dress and can do the calculations yourself to find out what that would have
costed.
Now, whilst this may not be a perfectly matchy-matchy outfit,
because we’re dealing only with different shades rather than different colours
(like in the coord above), it flows together a lot nicer. I had a hard time
picking the shoes – I own several that are loliable and that were cheap, but
how do I decide where lies the boundary between “this is lolita enough” and
“this isn’t”? In the end I settled on those that I used more for lolita than
anything else, which luckily meant that they worked with the rest of the colour
scheme. It’s almost too perfect that while the first coord was a proof that
high price doesn’t necessarily mean a cohesive outfit, the cheapest coord flows
together so nicely and is a wearable outfit having only two pieces of brand!
With the most expensive coord it was quite obvious how the
cost stacked up so much so quickly – how did I get this one to be so cheap? I’ll
do you a quick price breakdown of each piece. The JSK was around £15 bought
second hand and the shoes were an eBay find at £14.56. Both the blouse and the
bolero are charity shop finds that cost me £2.50 and £2.99 respectively. The
bag was technically a freebie with Melt magazine, but since I had to pay £8 for
the magazine to get it, I’m counting that cost. And the beret and socks were
free, the former being a Secret Santa gift and the latter – a freebie with another
purchase.
What would happen if you put together all your most and
least expensive pieces? Do you think they’d make a cohesive coord or would they
be all over the place? Have a go at doing this challenge, it was quite fun to
see what would happen and told me a lot about my wardrobe (like that my cheap
pieces tend to be more versatile than my most expensive ones).
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