I was recently inspired by ohsewblack to make a post about my very first lolita meet up. Read her post here about her preparing for her first meet and building her first coord. The story made me nostalgic and I realized I did not blog back in 2018 so I never posted about my first meetup. So today I have decided to reminisce about my first lolita meet and what I wore there.
It was sometime in May of 2018 when one of my local friends who also was interested in lolita would message me about going to a meetup two hours away for ILD. There is a comm out that way who has a FB group that she somehow found and joined. I had been wearing lolita for six years at this point but never attended a meet. I was dissuaded from lolita community life by former lolita friends and fed a lot of crap online about lolita communities being really toxic and judgmental. I was content being a lone-lita. But the prospect of being with other lolitas was tempting and since my friend didn’t want to go alone, I decided I would go with her.
The meet up was a tea party meet for international lolita day.
I didn’t own a lot of lolita at this point. I think I had three dresses and two skirts and four out of the five items were Bodyline. I decided to fall back on my most reliable piece; Bodyline’s Cecelia Merry-Go-Round JSK. I did not own a summer appropriate pink blouse that fit, but since I was wearing a JSK anyway, I opted to wear a pink Bodyline blouse that was a bit too small and just leave it unbuttoned under the dress (which amazingly worked out). I decided to go all black and pink with the coord and wore my favorite Bodyline pink heels, black ruffled ankle socks, and a pink purse. I wore a gold pony necklace to play on the carousel print, I also wore glittery pink star earrings because of the stars throughout the print, and a medium size, pink polka-dot bow hair clip, which I justified due to the polka-dots that so often adorn the bottom on Bodyline dresses. I wore a short, straight brown wig with bangs and no wrist accessories or rings. It was a bare bones coord and I was terrified of being judged or snubbed for wearing Bodyline. I thought the comm members wouldn’t see me as a “real” lolita because of it but I had no other choice but to wear what I had.
The meet up went really well. I was so happy because the turn out was large and I had never been around so many lolitas at once in my life. No one was judgmental towards me or my friends and our Bodyline coordinates. In fact, many people at the meet were also wearing items from Bodyline. I would later learn that Bodyline just does not carry the level of stigma that people online would have you to believe. The host, who would go on to be a good friend of mine was extremely sweet and made sure me and my friends felt welcomed since we were completely new to the group. I had a really nice time meeting people and just being in a situation where I could wear and enjoy lolita with other people outside of my house!
I ended up getting this notebook from a raffle at the meet which I have been using as scrapbook to document my coords. This was the first event I went to in lolita that was not an anime convention and it would reignite my passion for the fashion after taking a step back to go to college. Immediately after this I would throw down the money to get my dream dress (Sweetie Violet) because I wanted to go to more meets. I would wear Sweetie Violet to the comm’s ILD meet-up the following June. I would go on to attend many other meets with the comm and eventually become a moderator and start hosting my own meets. I am really grateful to my friend who wanted to go, I probably never would have gone to meets or sought a comm if not for her. And I am grateful to my comm members for being such accepting people and making me feel comfortable so I would want to come back!
I would love to hear about your first meet up and what you wore! Leave a comment below
Mahou Queen 