The Emotional Baggage of Lolita Fashion

The Bibliotheca bloggers are all talking about baggage. It’s understandable: summer months are fast approaching in the Northern Hemisphere and with them, summer holidays and travels.

I’m not here to tell you how to pack your frills or to give you a travel capsule wardrobe. I’ve done that, others have done that, that is not what’s on my mind right now. I’m here to talk about…

EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE!

Photo by Eminent Luggage on Pexels.com.

Now, since the phrase gets misused a fair bit, let’s establish what emotional baggage is, so that we’re all clear on what we’re talking about here. According to the Collins Dictionary, emotional baggage refers to “the feelings you have about your past and the things that have happened to you, which often have a negative effect on your behaviour and attitudes.” In other words, it’s the stuff that we hold onto that isn’t serving us right now or even anymore.

But Paulina, I hear someone say. Lolita fashion is overall a good thing, it brings joy through beauty and community, how can there be any emotional baggage around that? Well, everything can have emotional baggage tied to it, even the good stuff. This post is going to touch on matters of body image and finances, so if that’s not something that you can comfortably read about right now, it’s best to stop here.

Having just moved flats, which involved not only shoving all my clothes into whatever would fit them and lugging them up several flights of stairs, but also confronting the fact that their volume far surpasses the available storage space, I am acutely aware of the various feelings that surfaced during that process. Little brings your emotions about something to the forefront as vividly as the stress and hassle of moving. Not that I’m recommending that as a means of deciding whether to keep a dress or sell it, don’t do that! Just saying that if you’re moving anyway, this is likely the sort of a rollercoaster that you can expect to find yourself on.

The elephant in the room is facing the amount of stuff that I have. Although lolita dresses make excellent protective material for breakable items, sitting on a suitcase to help it close really homes in on the guilt about owning so much. Not even in any sort of greedy or gatekeeping or even any ‘when will I wear it’ sort of way. It’s just guilt of being literally faced with how much I own, the volume, the amount, the sheer number of individual items in my possession. And in no small part guilt for still wanting more. Sure, at no point in my life was I ever a minimalist and whilst there are lolitas out there being perfectly happy with their capsule wardrobes or small collections of extremely cherished items. Some of that is definitely down to growing up in post-communist Poland and being passed down this desire to have stuff. The guilt comes from a combination of knowing my privilege to even be able to engage in a luxury fashion like lolita, being perfectly aware of the damage the fashion industry is dealing to our environment, and still resenting that decisions of previous governments have fucked my generation over so that the economic prosperity we were promised growing up is more like two unprecedented financial crises, an inaccessible housing market, and massive financial inequality. Nothing quite like looking at three packed IKEA bags of clothing that have nowhere to live to make you realise that this particular baggage is not just physical.

Unironic actual footage of (not even all) the stuff left waiting for the last bits of furniture to unpack it to.

Then there’s the ongoing struggle of bodies and sizes that isn’t specific to me. So many in the EGL community know that lolita clothing, for all its glory, can also make individuals feel bad about themselves, in the same way as mainstream fashion does. Although sizing relying on measurements is far healthier than arbitrarily picking numbers to represent a size, the one size never truly fits all and patterning with the East Asian audience in mind will always spring up issues for other silhouettes. This is despite our community making significant progress in the area of alterations being accepted and talked openly about. Combined with changes at an individual level, lolita fashion brings so much emotional baggage from the loft storage into your front room. Grew up in the 2000s? You now don’t have an accurate view of your own body or what is considered slim or fat. Regularly going through changes? You’re now paranoid about every slight shift that impacts whether an item fits or not. Spent years, decades maybe, building your collection that you now can’t comfortably wear? No wonder that you’re growing resentful of your clothes as they bring back good memories alongside the hefty alterations price tag to get all of those done. Any one of these things, or many more that fit under this umbrella, can weigh a person down enough to feel like that emotional baggage is actually made of lead. And this isn’t a bag that just needs putting down, this is one that needs actually unpacking or fully throwing out into the sea. Metaphorically, of course, we’ve already gone over pollution.

At least size doesn't matter when it comes to sufficiently protecting my precious Lenox spice village.

Lastly, moving houses with a big collection of lolita clothes makes you realise how much you’ve invested into this. We joke that we translate prices into clothes, “You could get two brand dresses for that!,” when the facts are that not everything should be measured like that. Not only because the cost of lolita clothing does not include the same factors as the cost of, say, furniture, but also because that metaphor only applies on a luxury to luxury scale or a want to want one. In comparison to necessities? Not so well. As scary as it can be to really absorb the cost of adult expenses like a bed with a mattress or a fridge, these aren’t things that you can live without. And just like it’s worth investing in clothing quality, so it’s worth investing in the quality of your big purchases that you will use daily. Exposure got me over the initial pause when buying lolita brand new, even though there’s always that paranoid sentient suitcase of emotional baggage sitting on my shoulder that’s terrified of spending more than what I have on frivolities. It’s not actually a floating sentient suitcase, I am just making a link to emotional baggage, you hopefully get the gist. 

Forever committed to having matching hangers. Which, by the way, don't fit into an archiving box. In case you ever find yourself in that position.

This isn’t all to say that emotional baggage is something that you, me, anyone has to live with. Baggage can be unpacked, left behind, throw out, burned down etc. as well as carried. Realising that you have it is the first step in doing something about it. Lolita fashion can sometimes involve more of it than some other styles or hobbies. The good thing that we have on many others though is our community. Openly chatting about these kinds of baggage helps lessen it by sharing the burden, as well as getting practical tips from people who have likely gone through the same. Many of these will likely never disappear – but just knowing that we are not carrying that alone helps.

It's a lot of stress, but does mean that eventually my new coord photo spot looks like this and I have access to all my clothes once more.

Hopefully I managed to pull the end of this out of the doom and gloom hole. This isn’t intended to get anyone feeling down about themselves, lolita fashion or the state of the world, but to observe the kinds of feelings about it that the simple act of moving, packing, and unpacking have brought up for me. But if you’re after a more light-hearted read, I’m sure that at least one of the other Bibliotheca bloggers will have you covered on that. Sign up to the newsletter, so that you don’t miss it!