#apollonia

Apollonia van Ravenstein, British Vogue, December 1971.

Apollonia's outfit for the Bloodhaven Ball, sans mask because I don't have hands anymore. Please excuse any messy bits you see; somewhere between doing the lace and the silver, I could feel my hand dexterity flee from my body.

Different lighting/angle below to show the metallics.

I'm in Mary Magdalene's studio! (No, not really.)

MM's stock photos remain a constant source of inspiration and also mild nostalgia for me, although by the time I started getting into lolita, the brand was already on the decline. I especially liked the combination of OP over JSK shown in their Rose Basket JSK blog post, and I am lucky enough to own almost all of the same items, so recreated the aforementioned photo as well as and the full body (ish) stock photo (15 years later!)

Getting the posing and look right was difficult as it was just me and my camera! Every time I took a few photos, I had to get up and cross check the pose beside the original on my phone before sitting down and rearranging my skirt for a whole new attempt. So the pose has quite a lot of differences! The lighting is also much more shadowy since I use natural light from my window (on one side), whilst the original likely has some kind of studio floodlight going on. Regardless, hopefully I managed to evoke the original well enough.

Of course, as a constant nitpicker I can see so many (albeit minor) differences between the photos that I couldn't overcome...I am slightly taller, as well as less slim than the original model 😂 the JSK is actually handmade (blog post on that soon) and I believe it is a cm or two shorter than the original due to a lack of bodice fabric. I really cannot figure out for the life of me how the model managed to have so much fabric pooling at the bottom in her sitting pose, though--can I really chalk it up to body proportions?

The shoe colour is also obviously different (someone please sell me the framboise Sylphid shoes) aand if you look really closely, the background pattern is upside-down! (50% chance of hanging it the same way as MM and I got it wrong 😳)