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).