Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Lolita Fashion

    by An Nguyen and Jane Mai May 25, 2017 6 minutes

    Drawing by Jane Mai, from the cover of So Pretty/Very Rotten.

    Have you ever seen the Japanese movie Kamikaze Girls (aka Shimotsuma Monogatari)? It came out back in 2004 (released in the United States in 2006) and was based on the 2002 novel by Japanese author Novala Takemoto. The story is about an unlikely friendship between two high school girls—Ichigo, who is a member of a Yanki girl biker gang, and Momoko, who wears a niche fashion style called Lolita fashion.

    In Shimotsuma, a rural town in Ibaraki prefecture, Momoko stands out in her Rococo-inspired Sweet Lolita outfits with lots of lace, frills, ribbons, and colors like pink, red, and sax blue from her favorite brand Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (BTSSB). On the weekends and holidays, she makes a two-and-a-half-hour train trip to Tokyo so she can go clothes shopping in the Harajuku and Daikanyama neighborhoods. Being a high school student, she does not have a job, so she swindles money

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review32 min read
    The Art of Poetry No. 116
    Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Farah Al Qasimi
    Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

    Related