Outfit Details:
Dress: Bodyline | Vests: Savers, Plato's Closet | Detachable collar: c/o Born Pretty
Shawl: Buffalo Exchange (actually a skirt) | Socks: Forever 21 | Shoes: ModCloth
Cat Bag: TaoBao | Wristcuffs: Handmade (secondhand)
The more I dress in mori-kei, the more comfortable I feel putting outfits together. In my day-to-day outfits, I love layering, but not to the extent mori requires. In mori, it's a little bit of a challenge for me! (The title of this post is an homage to the infamous scene from Shrek - onions have layers, ogres have layers!)
For this meetup, we were going to have a picnic, but the forecast called for rain. Instead, we had brunch and shopped around. I was going to go for a more traditionally mori look, but felt like brunching and shopping was more suited to a lolita look, so I merged the two. This is one of my favorite J-fashion outfits of all time!
I'm wearing quite a few layers here. First of all, the base of the outfit is this plain white lolita dress. That's topped with two different vests, a detachable collar, a pearl necklace, and - my favorite piece - a skirt I wore as a shawl. It's actually a lace maxi skirt with a huge slit up the side, so it opens into one big rectangular piece. Perfect! I love finding new ways to wear pieces.
Normally, I don't wear my own hair with J-fashion looks and prefer to wear wigs, but I think red hair suits the Mori archetype well, so I wore my favorite style, maiden braids.
We were stopped a lot with people asking if we were "living dolls" (thanks, TLC), "Harajuku girls" or "in a play." But, as usual, dressing up in public mostly results in positive attention, especially from the older crowd. I guess they get a kick out of it!