Hi Lauran, I've been a fan of your outfits for over a decade. Would you ever consider making a post about your experience as a pioneer in lolita fashion? I went to Jingu bridge in 2013 and couldn't help but notice how barren it was compared to pictures I'd seen of yours from the mid 2000s. I can't help but wonder what it was like... Also, what brought you to Japan and how did you get into lolita? Thanks for considering my questions!
Thank you for your message. That’s a really hard story to sum up in one post.Â
I guess to answer your questions specifically:
I would consider it.  I’ve never really recounted the story in any specific detail before.  I have no clue how boring or entertaining it would be to an outside reader, so I never really considered writing it down before.  I have my blog Lauran.com but naturally it’s missing a lot of details. ~~What brought me to Japan?  I’ve always had an interest in Japanese culture due to a love for Japanese video games, which is why I wanted to study the Japanese language in the first place (I had this very weebish dream of ordering Japanese games before they were localized so I could play them earlier). Â
While studying, I learned more about Japanese culture, music, fashion, etc. Â It was 2002 when I learned about Malice Mizer, Moi dix Mois, Dir en grey, Gackt, Buck-Tick, Mucc. Â I learned about Gothic Lolita through Mana and Malice Mizer, and researching him led me to ordering the new Gothic and Lolita Bibles through an import book store.Â
By 2003 I wanted to try wearing it myself instead of just looking at it, and none of the brands sold overseas. Â Your options were hand-sewing, having a shopping service like Crescent Shop order for you, or piecing something together from pre-made clothes. Â I made some really awful coordinates at first, altered swing dresses combined with fetish wear and hot topic accessories.
Then I tried sewing my own outfit using a pattern from Gothic and Lolita bible using cheap curtain fabric which turned out to be a total mess.  It wasn’t until 2004 and already in Japan to study abroad for my junior year of university that I was able to finally afford to buy a few pieces from the cheaper brands like Putumayo and h.Naoto summer sales bins.Â
My first few brand coordinates weren’t actually mine, a handful of livejournal friends asked me to go shopping for them and asked me to put them on and photograph them for them to see how they looked.  Those dresses were from MAM/Maxicimam and Pina Sweet.  One girl bought quite a lot of stuff from many different brands, and instead of paying me for my services (I was doing her a favor, not running a shopping service for profit), she bought me my first outfit from BTSSB to thank me.  After experiencing the luxury of brand clothing, I became more diligent in saving my money and shopping for brands like Victorian Maiden, MMM, etc.  Over the years I’ve tried most of the other styles as they’ve come into trend, but I still consider the original gothic lolita style my favorite.  I’m extremely amused at the recent old school lolita trend.  It doesn’t really feel old to me.~
The scene in Harajuku (at least the bridge gathering on Sundays) has been dead for a while so I’ve heard.  From my understanding everyone just paired off with their respective friends groups and now meet in cafes, restaurants, tea parties, and live concerts instead.  The Harajuku scene lost it’s appeal after being taken over by too many tourists, attention seekers (those free hugs guys and crazy dancers, etc), political activists, not to mention the regular foot traffic.  Sometimes if we were unlucky, we’d get the right wing nationalists in their propaganda cars that would camp the street with a speaker phone and tell us we were all a disgrace.  It’s also key to remember that the bridge was mostly visual kei cosplayers, so the decrease in mainstream popularity in visual kei music means less cosplayers.  Not to mention a lot of visual kei bands are ditching the costumes and trying to separate themselves from their past, and even going so far as to badmouth it, so it puts pressure on cosplayers to stop cosplaying in respect of the bands ‘new image’ (I’m looking at you Dir en grey).Â
A lot of the lolitas you would see on the bridge were usually just popping in and out while visiting their cosplay friends, using it more like a ‘let’s meet up here and then go shopping and take purikura’ type of place.  So they wouldn’t stay long, even back then.  The group that I was in, the kind that would stay all day and all night, was small, about a dozen of us, and they were neither cosplayers or lolitas specifically, more like a rag tag team of bored youths with a common interest in japanese rock music and alternative fashion.  You still see Kyouka haunting the place though, he’s the longest lasting one out of the group, I think he feels its his personal mission to keep going.Â
There is a really terrible and mildly embarrassing documentary that someone recorded of one of my visits to Harajuku in 2007.  The video they recorded inside my apartment wasn’t supposed to be published, hence the disarray of my apartment, bedhead, and wearing pajamas (they woke me up at asso’clock).  Because of the lack of professionalism, I refused to introduce them to my friends, which is why it cuts off rather short on the bridge side of the video.  In hindsight though, it’s somewhat more honest than if I was prepared for it.There are two parts - a teaser and the video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzwtnt4n4QUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl5iwPaddk0There are a couple more old short clips/videos in there from that time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCBOUx5dOB8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY5NohYHONQ~~
What was it like?  If you’ve been then you’ll know there are two sides, the big main side and the narrow/small side, divided by a street in the middle.  There were several photographers that would camp out at the end of the small side.  They were all a bit different in the way they photographed the cosplayers.  Most of them were middle aged, and quite respectable. There was a young man with a baseball cap and a 35mm camera that would take dozens of shots in glossy full color.  Another with a telephoto zoom lense that camped in the street and would make you stand 15 yards away.  Another had a digital camera with a portable printer, lower quality photos, but he would document each person who visited with one photo and stick in a binder, the cosplayers loved him because he’d let you look at the photos.  There was another photographer, a middle aged deaf man with bleached hair and a polaroid camera, he was slightly goofy.  My favorite was a very professional photographer who shot only in black and white, he gave me several beautiful sets, but he disappeared from Harajuku, and I didn’t see him again until I saw him on the news on tv in 2006,  he’d moved his attention to Akihabara cosplayers instead.  There was one other photographer that took a keen interest in me, his photographs weren’t anything special.  He would call my cellphone (Japan is a country of texting, so it was doubly awkward that he would call), and he would give me gifts of kimonos and yukatas (most of which I regifted after I left Japan).
 Also on the narrow side of the bridge with the photographers, it was almost exclusively Dir en grey cosplayers at the time when I went.  Dir en grey has a very dedicated cosplay fan base, and I was part of that group for a long time since I cosplayed as Kaoru back then. Â
The main side of the bridge was everyone else, all the other visual kei band cosplayers, non-specific visual kids, lolitas, musicians looking to network with new fans, and all the tourists. Â
There was a purikura shop across the street in a basement of a building with a private bathroom and a large vanity mirror with bright lights that could sit three people side by side. Everyone would change and do their makeup there.  It was dingy and there was never any toilet paper in the bathroom because if they did put any in there everyone would waste it on their makeup.  Last I heard that purikura shop was flooded and closed down, so everyone ended up moving to the subway bathrooms and mcdonalds to change and do their makeup. Most cosplayers don’t get changed at home and then take public transportation while dressed up unless if they absolutely have to.  Back then lolita fashion was still considered deviant to wear in public outside of the designated subculture areas, but now that it’s more common people wear it much more frequently in public, so there is less appeal to go to Harajuku.  Back then going to Harajuku was a safe haven, now people can go wherever they like. Â
After getting changed, you’d go to the bridge, find your friends, network with new people, exchange business cards you’d make yourself with your your cosplay name and your blog address, and everyone would trade purikura like they were pokemon cards.  Networking was important to most cosplayers, because your blog would be submitted to a ranking site, and you could tell who the most popular cosplayers were by that ranking. The photographers would steal an hour of your time taking photographs one after the other.  Your friends would take pictures together with their own cameras.  Everyone mostly talked about music, recent shows, upcoming shows, future cosplay plans, shopping, gossip, look at other people’s purikura collections etc.  Everyone smoked a lot, I smoked at the time too, but quit shortly after I left Japan.  When the photoshoots and networking excitement would die down, everyone would pair off to go to take purikura together.  You’d go and come back several times, see if anyone else wanted to take purikura together, or just go with a big group all at once. At this point, it’s probably been several hours, everyone’s either freezing their butts off if it’s winter, or overheated and sunburnt if it’s summer, and ready to go inside somewhere/anywhere to eat and relax.  Usually at this point between taking purikura and dinner you’d find some bathroom to wash your makeup off and change your clothes, re-do your makeup, etc. Bringing your own hand towels and makeup remover tissues was always important. There were a couple choices to go after that.  There is/was a billiards and darts room on the top floor of one of the buildings at the entrance to Takeshita dori, some people would go there, or if they were hungry they’d go pile into McDonalds, go to karaoke, go shopping, go to the cafe Repi Doll (my fav), or go home.  I would usually go hit up Closet Child, then drink tea and eat cheese on toast with my friends.  If the weather was nice, we’d grab food from the convenience store and hang out all night outside on the bridge picnic style.  Sometimes if a friend’s band had a show, we’d go pile in a train and head to wherever they were playing and catch it, usually followed up by an all night all you can drink karaoke afterparty til 6am, and then lay down like sardines on someone’s apartment floor to sleep it off and play Japanese video games I couldn’t understand (the fact that it was this very thing that started me on the path in the first place does not escape me) or watch old band concert videos.  Then you’d wake up, go home, take a shower, deal with your week, and come back the next sunday and do it all over again. The all night gothic parties (Alamode Night, Tokyo Dark Castle) usually landed on Saturday nights, so sometimes you’d go party and dance all night, take a nap at mcdonalds in the morning, before going to Harajuku on Sunday, and then leave early to crash.  The photographers usually have your photos ready from the previous weekend, and they give you a stack of print outs you get to keep for free.  Another thing that I forgot to mention, sometimes while walking around, official photographers might stop you and hand you a clipboard with a questionnaire and a release form and take your photograph for magazine street snaps.  Other times we’d go to Shinjuku for KERA snap, which was held in the stairwell of Maruione, the dates were always announced in advance in the KERA magazine, and there were always way more people in line for the snap than there were spaces on the page, so getting into a Kera snap was kind of like winning the lottery.  I remember when Marui One was it’s own building farther away from Shinjuku station.  The old building was wider, big open floorplan, not like the newer Maruione which is narrow and cramped.  The shops felt more spacious.  I guess that’s why they moved, too much of a niche for all that expensive luxury realty space.  Financially it made sense to move.   I haven’t been back in a long time, so I couldn’t tell you what’s it’s like now, but from what I see it’s not the same as it used to be.  Welp, this is longer than I anticipated it to be.  Hopefully that answered your questions!
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