Right, so we talked about the Ganguro look, the Japanese fad of the ’90s. The look that replaced it is called the Gothic Lolita style, sometimes called Loli-Goth.

  Teenage girls mostly dress in the Loli-Goth style. The idea of the look is to wear frilly clothes that mimic the look of a Victorian era doll. (Because everyone would like to be an emotionless porcelain doll that collects dust.)

Gothic Lolita has been around for a while, but it first picked up with the entrance of visual bands in Japan. Visual bands are musicians who wear elaborate costumes and almost “act” out their music. To this hour I’m still trying to figure out what that means. Popular visual bands include Malice Mizer and X Japan. These boys weren’t beyond cross dressing, although it sorta defeated the point if you ask me. The Loli-Goth look became more mainstream around 1998.

The Loli-Goth look hit full-blown culture status in 2001 when hordes of stores and boutiques were opened to cater to this teenage group. Baby, The Stars Shine Bright is a good example of these copious stores. Really, you have to applaud the Japanese. They don’t bat an eye at what the teenage group is doing ‘for attention’, they just open up stores to economize on these strange fads.

So what does the Loli-Goth look, look like? Well they usually wear black clothes with white accents. They wear skirts which are usually knee length and have a petticoat to give them more volume. Trim, lace and ribbon are used as accents for the entire outfit. Then they wear over knee stockings or black tights, and black shoes. These shoes usually have one strap and have thick heels. (Not high heels, thick heels. The entire shoe has a heel that can be several inches thick, I can’t imagine trying to walk in those.) Frilly or ruffled blouses are commonly worn on top. Some additions include Alice in wonderland type aprons, lace headpieces, gloves, dolls, teddy bears, parasols and small top hats. Compared to the Ganguro look makeup is used sparingly. The best way to describe this look is to wear clothes that make you look as young as possible. A weird goal, although the clothes are pretty cute.

Why do they dress like this? A combination of two reasons. Again, they like the attention. (This desire fails about 90 percent of the time because all of Japan is so used to the style they no longer respond to the weirdo outfits.) Secondly, they want to dress up and feel elegant, pushing off the pressure of school, sports and clubs. Yeah, so getting a job to fund the insanely expensive clothes doesn’t add to that workload.

And that is the elegant childishness of the Gothic Lolita look! Thanks for dropping by.

Okay. So far we’ve talked about toilets, the arts and the language. What’s next? Fashion!!

Today we’ll take a look at the infamous Ganguro style! It was a fashion popular with Japanese girls in the ’90s.

A Ganguro girl would fake bake her way to extremely tan skin year round. (Usually an attractive shade of pumpkin color, and might I add: skin cancer by age 30?) Next they would bleach their hair to a blonde/orange/silver color. (Perfect match with the orange-ish skin.) Some of the girls would buy blue colored contacts, and to finish this eye catching look a Ganguro girl would wear pastel eye shadow, silver pink lipstick and plastic sticky jewels on her face. The amount of make up varied from girl to girl, depending how devote they were to the style. The extremists would wear the make up almost like face paint. (Looking at them you could mistake them as a Broadway actress in costume or some sort of tanned clown.)

In addition to their interesting facial make up, these girls often wore bright colors, platform shoes and a lot of rings and bracelets. They also used a lot of slang and were generally portrayed negatively by the media. (Many Japanese books have the main female character picked on by clownish looking Ganguro girls.)

The Ganguro girls were generally fans of hip hop and attracted attention to themselves (because really who could miss a fake baked clown sitting next to them?) because they thought it was the ultimate way of self expression. They adopted this fashion for the attention. This style is now rarely seen and has been replaced with the “Goth Lolita” look, which we’ll examine later.

This is probably the only picture on the internet where a Japanese girl is not doing the traditional “V” or peace sign pose.