Monday, April 26, 2010

Spring/Summer Collections

During one of my last visits to the Baby, The Stars Shine Bright shop in Paris, I was given the 2010 Spring/Summer catalogue as a "gift" for my purchase. I must say all in all, this is a rather disappointing season for me. I did see a few things that caught my eye though.

Damn it Baby! Who said you could try to put bare legs in mah Rorita again? XD

The ugly:

While I don't think that the cream puff skirt version of this design is terrible, the doll version of the JSK is downright hideous. There is just way too much going on and it reminds me of some of the more poorly designed Angelic Pretty rip offs that have been produced over the years.

The Bad:

While this set isn't even that ugly, I can't seem to help but hate it. It reminds me too much of something Mr. Yan would come up with. Bodyline releases dresses like this all the time. I suppose part of it stems from my extreme hatred of aprons, but this dress just isn't doing it for me.

This was another dress that had potential. While I kind of like the black version of this dress (It's my love of stripes, I can't help it), I feel that this print is overall just ugly. It's very plain and boring. On top of the bad print, I find the design of the actual garments to be equally as boring. While this had both the card suits and the stripes going for it, ça me laisse froid.

The Good:

While I'm once again not thrilled with the design of these dresses, I do love the print. If the design were better, this would be up there with Vampire Requiem for me. I do like that unlike Vampire Requiem, they actually released a few accessories like a tote bag purse. The wine bag give away and the brief case style purse that were available for Vampire Requiem left something to be desired. I personally would have like to have at least seen socks or something.

Although I really hate that they modeled this on a guy in the catalogue, I really love this dress. It's obviously not lolita at all, but it's very beautiful. It reminds me of something I'd see from h.Naoto more that Alice and the Pirates. While I find it to be quite beautiful, I don't think I will be purchasing this one myself. I think the dress would sit strangely on someone with any sort of curves, which is probably why this guy is modeling it instead of Kanon Wakeshima like the rest of the dresses in the Alice and the Pirates section of the catalogue. I really like that Alice and the Pirates went for something that stands out as original in this little catalogue of recycled frills.

The Awesome:

I almost feel like I don't need to put a description here about why this is awesome. I mean, it is after all the Marie Antoinette JSK... This print has been many people's dream dress for as long as i can remember. I , myself, would love to have the blue version. I don't even know how I would coordinate it in my 90% black and white wardrobe. But I do know that I want it very badly. The other colors are amazing as well, but there is just something about the blue that gets me.

The Meh:

While I absolutely love the print for this dress, I can't help but be left unmoved by the overall designs of the dresses. While both the OP and JSK strike me as frumpy and unflattering, I'm not terribly excited to see yet another corset skirt. Perhaps my dislike of the skirt stems from my not buying the Castle of Nightmare skirt when I last saw it, but I think it stems more from how I rarely see anyone pull them off without acquiring either a boobloaf or boob shelf in the process of it all. So while this had the opportunity to wow me, it fell short, therefore the meh.

Overall, I feel like I'm seeing a lot of the same thing over and over again. I feel as if even though Baby isn't releasing the same OTT sweet designs every month like Angelic Pretty, it all feels very much like I've seen it before. Not all of it is necessarily even bad. It's just disappointing to see the same concepts being recycled so soon that didn't wow me the first time around, with the sole exception being the Marie Antoinette series, which wows me every time I look at it.

I also just saw Angelic Pretty's new Wonder Cookie Cutter print. I was also disappointed in this one as well. I really like the black version of Sugary Carnival ,the mint versions of Melty Chocolate and just about every version of Starry Night Theatre but this was just poorly executed I think. This one also has that feeling of being a recycled design, more specifically the print looks so familiar to me as a mesh of several of their older prints. I don't agree with their choice of stripes for the dress. I think it adds too much to the already busy print. While the pink and white colorway seems less busy than the others, the black colorway makes my head hurt.

Those are my current feelings on Lolita fashion. I'm looking very much forward to the Marie Antoinette rerelease and will have a very hard time resisting if I can afford it when it is released. I've always been a sucker for the blue version from the very moment I saw it. Hopefully the Fall/Winter catalogue will make me feel better about the fashion I love so much.

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