I'm here for a surprisingly timely post to celebrate my favorite season: Halloween. Today, I'd like to share a little about why Halloween is the most lolita holiday.
Halloween combines two great categories of holiday: silly and morbid. This combination isn't unique, even within the Anglo-American cultural sphere (just look at some historical Christmas practices!), but the way the different elements come together makes Halloween uniquely excellent.
Halloween is a holiday of fools and costumes; the "trick" in "trick or treat" is there for a reason. The most common manifestation of this is full costumes, either for costume parties, trick-or-treating, or parades, but people still do play the occasional prank. Moreover, even out of costume, whimsical clothing is much more accepted on Halloween than the rest of the year.
Halloween also has morbid roots-- as a historical celebration, Samhain mostly featured spirits and ghosts, but the proliferation of horror media and the joy of masquerade has exponentially expanded the standard cast of Halloween characters. Mummies, vampires, zombies, and the reanimated dead all feature prominently on the deathly side of things, while werewolves, clowns, witches, aliens, and cops are all common costumes that can be scary without the same grave associations.
Halloween helpfully has developed strong iconography that can be used as visual shorthand for the holiday. Ordinary things like pumpkins, bats, spiderwebs, and skulls are practically inextricable from Halloween. Some color combinations (orange and black or purple and green) have become near-exclusively associated with the holiday. Crosses, though plentiful year-round, are basically ubiquitous in Autumn-- unfortunately for me (a certified cross hater).
Basically, Halloween has so many different-yet-complimentary aspects that the holiday can neatly dovetail into just about any lolita's style.
Overtly Halloween Prints
One of my favorite parts of Halloween is the playful seasonal prints that come out. Unlike Valentine's Day's sugar-sweet pink love hearts, or Christmas with its brash red gifts and green trees, Halloween motifs are versatile enough to suit any substyle.
Halloween lets gothic- and classic-leaning brands that typically release more austere dresses get a little playful. Alice and the Pirates is my favorite for this; they've done Halloween releases ranging from the austere Vampire Lament to the downright sugary Chris's Sweets Factory.
Conversely, the sweeter brands get to dip their proverbial toes into darker themes and colors for Halloween. The most notable brand for this is Angelic Pretty, whose Holy Lantern print has been released more times than I'd bother to count.
Brands that release in many styles, like Royal Princess Alice and Krad Lanrete, also take full advantage of the playful disorder and characteristic themes of the holiday.
The irreverence and versatility of Halloween themed prints make them great wardrobe additions. I know of hardcore gothic lolitas who love Holy Lantern despite being Angelic Pretty, and sugar-sweet lolitas who'd never touch a coffin motif normally but will happily wear Horror Candy Shop. Halloween prints give lolitas the change to break our strict boundaries and mix it up.
Other Halloween Releases
Lolita design isn't limited to prints, though. The visual language of Halloween is strong enough that even relatively plain pieces can read as festive for the holiday.
Spiderwebs and batwings, stylized as reverse scallops, are a staple in the visual language of Halloween. Even though there aren't any print elements, Alice and the Pirates' Spiderweb Lace JSK is about as unambiguously Halloween as a design can be. Halloween also allows brands to play with texture, as with the velvet, pleather, and lace combo in Elegy's Impish Salopette.
Uniform-themed pieces, even without overt spookiness, also feel within the Halloween spirit. Nurse dresses, including the infamous Metamorphose Hospitality Doll and the less infamous Physical Drop Hospitality Doll, might seem a little much for most of the year, but they really shine in October. Nun dresses like Moi appropriately named Nun OP are also Halloween suitable.
Lolita Costumes
Intermixing of lolita with costumes has been a contentious issue for a long time. Low-quality creepy doll, Alice in Wonderland, and Little Bo Peep costumes haunt lolitas' collective nightmares. However, combining lolita with costumes isn't inherently a bad thing.
My first experience wearing lolita in front of other people was a coordinate thinly disguised as a Halloween costume, and I know I'm not alone. Halloween is a chance for young lolitas to hatch from their leathery eggs and crawl towards the ocean (in this analogy, we are sea turtles). It is a truth universally acknowledged that any lolita's first coordinate is going to suck, after all, so wearing it on Halloween and adding some costumey elements isn't going to hurt anything.
For those with more experience in the fashion, Halloween is a liberating opportunity to play. I typically create two version of my Halloween costume-- one that's a strict interpretation of the character and one that's a lolita coordinate. Working with unusual themes brings out the creative aspect of the fashion.
Lolita itself isn't a costume, but incorporating high-quality lolita pieces can elevate a non-lolita costume. Furthermore, nobody's out there grading Halloween costumes on their adherence to the lolita rules. Halloween can be tacky and ridiculous, but to the untrained eye, even the best lolita coordinates can look equally ridiculous. In the end, the goal for both is the same: to do what makes you happy.
Happy Halloween!
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