Top 200 Photos: #117

Back to Otakon for today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #117 is:

Confusingly, Lolita fashion has noting to do with the novel by Nabokov about a man falling in love with an underaged girl. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita) Instead, it is an emphasis on Victorian-age fashion. It is, according to Wikipedia (and substantiated by what I’ve seen), subdivided into Gothic Lolita, Sweet Lolita, Classic Lolita, and Punk Lolita. I think this girl falls somewhere between Gothic and Sweet Lolita.

I think the Lolita fashion trend is very interesting visually. While it has been documented how much of a pain Victorian fashion was (especially for women), the intricacy of the patterns and dresses that we’d lost in modern fashion is so compelling. It also evokes an element of fantasy for me since I’ve mostly seen these types of fashions in fantastical movies and TV shows. Interestingly, quite a few works of science fiction have predicted a return to Victorian fashions and, in some cases, values. This is evident in The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson and Firefly episode where they attend a ball. I wonder how likely this would really be. When I said it was pain that was often literally the case with the use of form fitting bodices. And, I’ve read that it was quite a few decades after public restrooms debuted before they had women’s rooms because it was such a pain to undress to the level where one was able to use the bathroom that most women just held it in until they returned home at the end of the day.

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