/cgl/ - Cosplay & EGL

>>10194289

If you want to lean into the character, I think it becomes a question of where to wear the whole outfit, rather than whether it looks lolita or not. Keep in mind that when you go to a lolita meet, not everybody is going to be interested in anime/manga/vidya/whatver, and most of them don't really care whether you're dressed as x or y character. I'd say keep the character outfits for cons or fanmeets or wherever your fandom ranks higher up than lolita does.

For lolita meets, the important thing isn't who this character is, it's whether your outfit looks good. Try to assess it from that angle, like do these shoes look okay, is this dress too outlandish, does this hair match the dress, etc. With these in mind, the collab outfit you posted in your image looks fine as is for lolita, but something like this Meta collab would just be too outlandish for lolita.

Don't think about things like "this character always wears x and her boots must always be colour". That's the path where people start making poor choices like shoehorning weird cheap fleamarket items in because "this character likes it", and then it becomes costumey.

In other words, keep your fandom and your lolita seperate. Yes, it's possible to combine them, but if you give priority to fandom while dressing for a lolita, your outfit ends up looking "cosplay lolita". If you give priority to lolita while doing a fandom character, you end up being out of character.