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 Cheap “lolita” dresses from ebay are COMPLETELY UNUSABLE in lolita. They cannot be saved. There is no hope for them.

Let’s go into the details of why. Yes, there will be pictures.

So, for the ones who have forgotten or who are new to the party, I bought three “lolita” dresses off ebay for under $20 each. For those of you who are very new to the party, in general, a lolita OP (dress with sleeves) from a minor brand is about $150, a skirt is about $75. This depends on what brand you’re getting, and doesn’t include shipping (which is generally about $20 if you’re in the USA). Name brand items usually run about $350 for a dress and $200 for a skirt. Lolita isn’t cheap, and there’s a lot of reasons for that that I’ve discussed before on this blog.

And yet, there’s so many dresses on ebay that claim to be lolita, and are under $20. So, as, y’know, 20dollarlolita, I needed to find out what was going on. Is there a secret collection of lolita dresses that are hiding? What if they’re only awful because of one thing, and the lolita who can sew can convert them into cheap, quality clothing with a little love? Shouldn’t we at least check?

I’ve checked. Don’t do it.

So, quick beginning, WAY beginning, lolita is a fashion, not a costume. Anything that reminds you of Spirit Halloween should be avoided. Garments are over the top, but should be constructed like clothing, not like halloween costumes or whatever your teacher made you wear in the 3rd grade play.

Lolita is based on extravagance and quality. Shortcuts should not look or feel like shortcuts.

Lolita fabrics aren’t shiny. Even shiny lolita isn’t shiny. Lolita is about balancing texture and scale, to create an interesting piece that isn’t cluttered, skewed, or boring.

This can make the prices of lolita garments skyrocket (especially large skirt hems+quality trims), and buying premade lolita comes with accepting that on some level.

Or you can just do what these ebay people did and make some weird monster.

For each dress that I got, I tried to take a picture that would be as flattering to the dress as possible, as well as one that shows what the dress is like when worn with normal lolita foundations.

Dress #1:

(Seller’s ebay image)

This one is Women’s Lolita Cosplay Belt Dress Classic Black Red Pricess Dress Party Dress. Rolls right off the tongue. I ordered it in size L, color of gray.

Quick look at that image: It’s a high-waisted skirt, made of brocade, with a shaped, boned waistband with a front lacing. Even though it’s modeled on a petticoat, the fabric has structure that implies that it’s a thicker fabric. The manequin is also wearing a black blouse and a necklace.

(Shout out to my mother for taking these pictures for me)

First of all, this came in the form of a dress, with the blouse attached. The only thing resembling a closure is the front lacing. The careful observer will note that the print is upside-down.

The sleeves have a lace on the hem that I declared “unsuitable for lolita” way back in 2014. It’s the exact lace.

Due to my personal body size, the back of the skirt rises higher than the front, making the waistband very bizarre. There is no boning whatsoever. There is no structural body in the fabric or the construction.

You might say, “It doesn’t look that bad on the waist!” but you need to know that I’m wearing a boned corset and three petticoats under this to get that good shape.

Here’s the no-foundation-garment look, in case you want to see it without the corset: Ever seen an Oktoberfest bar wench?

(pardon the room background)

This isn’t the best style on me, but the construction makes it worse. Without any boning, the edges of the waist part of the skirt form weird bunchy lines that this fabric is known for.

And this is not a case where you can “just put boning in it and it’ll be fine.” The purpose of originally modeling this over a corset was to show that with boning, everything would still be very wrong.

As you can see by the narrow hem in that picture, the fabric is very thin. If you’ve ever bought a premade haloween costume, you’ve seen it. It’s that thin almost-satin, 100% polyester, similar to lining fabric. Because the design is just printed on, you don’t get the effect you get with real brocade where the different weaves and colors create different light patterns. Instead, you get an artificially bright contrast.

Things that are wrong: fabric type (no cutting it up and making something else for lolita), construction (why is the blouse attached to the skirt? clothes are not constructed like that), fit (size is fine but it’s the wrong measurements in the wrong places. It’s true-to-size but no one is those proportions in those places).

You can’t wear it as lolita, and if you think you can, seek out some actual lolita, touch it, and then touch this, and you’ll immediately know the difference. It has no trims to harvest. It is not on a fabric that can be converted into something. It is not worth $17.50, which is what I spent on it.

Dress #2: Gothic Lolita Dress Plus Size 5XL Women Fashion Vintage Classic Cosplay Costume. This garment is maybe 3 of those 10 descriptors.

Here’s a triple-layer skirt with a high wasit and suspender straps. The top layer is black frills that are cut on the circle (and then gathered as well). The second layer is made of a pinstriped suiting, where the stripes are woven in and are a fine gold color. On that second layer’s scalloped hem, there are two rows of what appears to be gimp trim. Under that is a gathered black skirt made of a matte fabric. (I actually bought this dress from the original maker, Souffle Song, but it’ll take a couple of months to get here. I’ll do a comparison when I get it.)

What I received was actually a skirt, so I put on a blouse that didn’t match at all, so you can tell where the blouse stops and where the dress starts.

First things first, this looks like it fits well, but that’s because I have a sizing clamp in the back. This thing was jumbo/LARGE, relative to what I was told on the sizing chart.

Here it is minus the clamp. There’s shirring in the back, but it’s not actually tight enough to be useful in terms of sizing. It’s more there because the back view of the dress they’re copying had shirring.

This dress has four buttons (gold-painted plastic) and two sets of suspender sliders that might, on another dress, be useful. The sliders aren’t useful on this dress because the smooth plainweave fabric can’t grip them, so they need to be pinned or sewn down to even function.

In the exact center front, there’s a spot where the merrow (that machine-finished edge) fell off the fabric and made a little loop of unfinished fabric and hanging thread.

As you can see, every component of this dress has much less fabric than the original, which results in barely the right shape.

The Spirit Halloween shiny synthetic fabric strikes again. I have to assume that it’s inexpensive to print onto, thus the popularity in this kind of application. As I’ll scream to the day I die, texture and scale and how you use them can make or break a garment, and this has no texture and totally the wrong scale.

Instead of having trim on the hem, it’s just printed on.

Due to the less fabric and the lack of drape in the blue layer, the black ruffled underlayer doesn’t hang with the blue layer. It creates a very different shape.

Again, due to the quality of fabric, there’s no saving this.