#topstitching

Generally, the visible stitching you see on lolita garments are just a byproduct of the fact that non-handmade lolita garments are manufactured products. The cost of a brandname lolita dress is already pretty expensive, so if there’s two ways to construct a garment, and both will be generally accepted by the lolita consumer as totally acceptable, the brands will pick the less expensive one.

But, the beauty of making handmade and budget lolita is that we are actually able to use techniques that cost a lot of money, because we’re the ones doing the labor and don’t need to pay ourselves an hourly wage.

Basically, there’s techniques that the most expensive brand can’t afford, but that we can do with no problem.

Generally, topstitching is used to hold things in place so that they don’t shift and move after being worn and washed. It’s also used on hems, and on places where lace or trim are attached.

Some garments will also use topstitching to make a piece lie flat, but that’s really kind of sloppy work a lot of the time.

It’s entirely possible to make complex shapes that lay flat just by doing the process of grading the seam allowance, clipping the curves, understitching the seam, and then hand sewing down any pieces that want to move. See the scallop hems tutorial for this process. Those first three steps are something you should do on all curved seams, by the way, regardless of if you topstitch them when you’re done.

Here’s the dress from the scallop hem tutorial, where you can see that the curved part of the skirt lays flat, and there’s no visible stitching on the hem. I did the hem invisibly because I didn’t like how it’d look to have visible stitching after I’d done so much for that scallop hem to be invisible.

And here we have two JSK straps made by the same maker. One’s got topstitching on the lace side and one doesn’t. I don’t know why this decision was made in manufacturing, but it sure was.

Bias binding is a pretty easy and fast alternative to topstitching a rolled hem, if you’re in a situation where you’d normally do that. This binding was done on a machine using the stitch-in-the-ditch technique, and it’s just as fast as double-turning a hem and sewing it down. As a bonus, a bias-bound hem doesn’t lose any length to the process of hemming the piece, so if your piece will be too short when you hem it, bias binding is a good option (it’s why I did this binding here).

So, no, topstitching usually isn’t necessary; it’s just the most cost-effective way to manufacture complex garments, and the average lolita consumer doesn’t care about if it’s present or not. If you look at a good-quality men’s suit coat, you’ll notice that there’s no visible stitching at all from the outside (an exception might be the buttonholes, but a very quality suit will use bound buttonholes that don’t have visible stitching, either). Wedding dresses have a similar lack of topstitching.

But the other beauty of handmade lolita, apart from how you can just use techniques that are too expensive for premade lolita, is that you don’t need to do anything that you don’t want. Ever. At all. There’s a huge number of styles of lolita and you’re allowed to say, “I don’t like this,” about pretty much anything and still find a style where it’s not a requirement. You don’t like wigs? heels? chiffon? That’s fine. There’s still lolita that doesn’t require those. Hell, if you want to be part of the lolita community and not wear petticoats, the most basic element of the lolita look, there’s still a subtype for that. You have power over your own look, and when you make your own lolita, you have power over your garments.

In fact, you can just say, “Very high quality garments look good without topstitching, and lolita is about quality, so I’m allowed to use alternatives to topstitching as long as it makes my garment look high quality,” and not really need to find another reason. In lolita, high quality is always acceptable.

(Quick semi-technical description for people who are pedantic about words:

(Topstitching is generally any kind of stitching that is visible on the outside of the finished garment. Some people argue that topstitching has to be applied by sewing the piece with the outside facing up, but I challenge those people to look at a piece topstitched from the top side and a piece “topstitched” from the bottom side and tell me they can see a difference.

(Edgestitching is sewing at just the very edge of a piece. You often use this to join pieces of lace together in the widthwise direction to make them look like one piece twice as wide. Edgestitching is done by laying both strips with the right side up and overlapping them. This means you don’t have a seam allowance to deal with, and lose very little width in the seaming process. They make edgestitching attachments for your sewing machine and if you sew ribbon or lace together, it’s worth it. You can’t really properly edgestitch fabric strips together, because the edge isn’t finished and so the stitching will just pull out.

(Edge stitching, with the space, pretty much just means stitching on the edge.