Thursday, August 29, 2013

Toying with Dolly Kei: An Experimental Polyvore Post

I rather enjoy dolly kei. So, for this week's post, I decided to play around with dolly kei outfits on polyvore.

Even though I don't identify fully with dolly kei, I love experimenting with new styles. Polyvore is a great way to do that without spending a dime. Who knows; maybe I'll start incorporating more dolly kei influence into my outfits. For now though, this is just me playing around with the style.



A challenge! I love the combination of black and gold in almost everything, but it's hard to keep dolly kei in that color scheme from tipping too far toward the black and therefore toward goth. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love goth, but this is me playing around with dolly kei. In order to prevent it from getting too black, I added the black and gold boots and tried to make sure everything had texture and gold details. I went heavy on the tassel accessories as well as the weird accessories - bird feet and a talon, to be precise - in order to keep it to dolly kei's folkloric style.

Yes, the same headband again! This picture of it is a slightly different shade, but it's the exact same item. This outfit was entirely inspired by that little bustier you see on the top. The tapestry detailing made it perfect for dolly kei and the muted colors made it a little different from the jewel tones I've usually seen. Again, lots of tassel details - on the bat! on the headband! on the belt! - and a lot of tapestry to round out the corset's influence.

The jewelry is from 1928, a brand which you should all check out whether you're into lolita, dolly kei, or shiny things in general. They make beautiful and classic designs that won't go out of style in a hot minute like many other brands do.

I don't know if many people can fully appreciate how much I love this dress and wish I'd had a chance to purchase it (or the embroidery skills to make something like it for myself...) It reminds me of Russian folk art, and so I put this outfit together specifically to highlight the details in the dress. The blouse I added both to lengthen the sleeves and add visual interest. Textured tights and a hand-painted necklace bring the floral motif to other bits of the outfit while not overpowering the main embroidery.

Pants aren't something seen all that often in dolly kei, especially pants worn by women. Sometimes harem pants creep in, but usually it's a lot of skirts and dresses. However, when I saw these tapestry shorts, I knew they were born to be part of a dolly kei outfit.

I paired them with a pair of textured tights both for leg coverage and for design purposes. The other parts of the outfit feature more tapestry on the shoes and bag, a bowler hat, and dolly kei standby items like tassels and feathers. The whole look feels very Germanic to me.

Dolly Kei: The Runaway Princess


This outfit has so much detail. I love that. Floral prints and trims everywhere, I tried to lend it a bit of shabby opulence. The tapestry details, embroidery, and velvet keep it looking old, but the whole effect is (I think) still rather glamorous and rich.

This is another one of those outfits inspired by a single item. In this case, it's the shawl... overskirt... thing... that I used here over the hips. The entire outfit was taken from that. This one gets most of its detail from fabric texture: gathers in the skirt, lace headbands, printed tights, velvet flats. I wanted to highlight that one item, so that's where most of the actual detail is concentrated. I tried to keep everything else fairly simple in order to highlight that.

Well, that's enough dolly style for now. Next week, we'll probably be back to lolita's frilliness, but, hey, who can tell?

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