F Yeah Lolita: meetups

Showing posts with label meetups. Show all posts

Misako Aoki in New York City

This first week of February 2014 is a pretty exciting week for Lolitas in the New York area! We're lucky enough to get a visit from Misako and a few very exciting Misako events.

Over the years, Misako has done a lot of cool things to bring Lolita to the limelight, from being one of Japan's first official Kawaii Ambassadors, to her new project the Japan Lolita Association, so it's really exciting for her to come to New York City!

Misako's first event in New York, on Wednesday the 5th, is to be part of a panel at the Japan Society, "Lolita Fashion: Costume or Culture?". Myself and Christina of Ramble Rori will actually also be speaking at that event! The panel will end with a Baby the Stars Shine Bright fashion collection showing and a meet and greet wine reception with Misako! You can buy tickets for the event here.

While in NYC, Misako will be filming with Jiji Press and is hoping to put together a group of Lolitas to ride The Ride around Midtown with her on Friday the 7th. This event is still tentative and dependent upon a few things, but if you happen to be free early Friday afternoon in NYC, you can check out how that's developing here (The latest news I've heard is that the tickets will be discounted to $20, but they need at least 15 Lolitas! The bottom of the post should have the newest info).

https://www.facebook.com/events/1455769397976660/

That Friday, on February 8th, we over at RuffleCon are lucky enough to have gotten the chance to sponsor an event with Misako! From 2-7PM Misako will be the guest of honor at a tea party in New York at The Dove parlor! There are a few activities planned for the evening, including a few raffles. There are only a very small number of spots left, so if this is something you're interested in, you can see details and prices here.

These are all really amazing events, and I'll personally be at the Japan Society event, as well as the tea party on Saturday. I think it's a really cool chance to get to see a big-name Lolita guest outside of an anime con environment, which is usually the only chance some of us get to meet Lolitas like Misako, especially out here on the east coast, where we have an unfortunate lack of physical Lolita shops.

Is anyone else planning on going to any of these events? If you're on the east coast, particularly the north east, what sort of Lolita events do you hope we one day get around here?

My Perfect Lolita Themed Halloween Party

I'm finally getting around to participating in a Lolita Blog Carnival again! This week's theme is just too perfect not to: My Perfect Lolita Themed Halloween Party. You heard that right, not just any Halloween party, but a Lolita one!

Some classic Halloween costume themes with a Lolita masquerade take.

I think that my ideal Lolita themed Halloween party would be a masquerade, for starters. I love the idea of a Halloween party where everyone goes all out with their outfits and wears fancy masks! Honestly, I think the idea of elaborate masks is more appealing to me than dressing up in an actual costume. I can imagine getting all decked out in an over the top themed outfit with a mask to match! I find that option much more decadent than costumes alone, which is totally befitting of a Lolita themed Halloween party.

Visit my Etsy treasury of masks here!

Etsy has tons of shops selling a variety of different types of masks! From shaped leather, to lace, to metal, to more traditional masks. If you're even a little bit crafty, mask making isn't terribly hard to do yourself, especially if you're just picking up a blank mask at a craft store and decorating it yourself.

As for decorations, personally, I like my Halloweens to be very traditional: spooky decorations, black and purple and orange, cobwebs, tattered table clothes, dim lights, and dry ice. That sort of thing. Whenever I see these super posh black and white Halloween parties that, besides the liberal use of black, the only thing Halloween about them is a centerpiece of chalkboard painted pumpkins with the word "Boo" expertly written on them nestled amongst some gold twigs I can't help but feel a bit sad. Halloween is too great of a holiday to try to "posh it up", and the trend of posh Halloween parties always feels a bit sterile and bland to me. Halloween is an excuse to go all out and pretend to be a Gothic heroine trapped in a spooky castle and be a little bit nostalgic and kitch in the process, we can save our chalkboard paint and pennant garlands for any other day of the year.

Some of my favorite inspirational Halloween party pictures! I keep a whole Pinterst album of them.
1 Love Manor. 2 Martha Stewart. 3 Small Words. 4 Lil Luna. 5 Creative Outlet. 6 Martha Stewart. 7 House of Dewberry. 8 Celebrating Style. 9 Family Chic.

So what sort of traditional Halloween party decorations would I include in my perfect Lolita themed Halloween party? I would definitely aim for something very Victorian inspired and elegant, since this is just a dream we're having here, I would do up the space like a Gothic Victorian parlor, as if a group of vampires got together sometime in the 1880's and had a party that never stopped, and no one had the time to update the decor or dust the cobwebs out of the corners. Think the Addams Family house, but with touches of deep blood red velvet and brocade. Food wise, there would be lots of sweets, from the traditional caramel apples, to an array of spookily designed cakes and finger food.

I love the idea of traditional Halloween games, but let's face it, no one in fancy dress and a mask is going to want to bob for apples, so to harken to a lot of these old games, many of which involve fortune telling or lucky/unlucky aspects, I would have a fortune teller at the party. Just a gloomy little candle lit corner where guests could have their palms or cards read.

To further this fortune-telling theme, I would love to have the event of the evening be an old fashioned Victorian seance, complete with an ectoplasm spewing medium, a spirit cabinet, and a levitating table. Very theatrical, and very spooky (for those who aren't aware of just how the parlor tricks that made seances so popular work!). Something like this would be like a much more exciting, and thematically appropriate, version of a haunted house. Plus wandering around in the dark in a fancy dress and mask isn't any fun, it's much better to be scared while perched on an elegant chair.