Crimson Reflections

Today’s post from the increasingly poorly named (considering I started in 2013) 52 Week Lolita Topic Challenge is 5. My wardrobe turnover.

First of all for anyone who is not familiar with the term turnover, it typically refers to the rate at which people or products leave a job or store and are replaced. It can also refer to a delicious pastry, and I really wish that is what this was referring to, because I adore cherry turnovers. But, alas, no, the topic of the day is the rate at which things leave my wardrobe and are replaced by other things.

Right now, there are roughly 80 dresses and skirts in my lolita closet, not including things like underskirts, or things I’m planning on selling (I can’t count socks, blouses, bags, etc or I’d go insane). And just by glancing over a few folders of images of things I’ve sold/planned on selling, I can safely estimate that I’ve sold another 70 dresses and skirts. So over the course of being a lolita, I’ve owned about 150 items, and I’ve sold off just shy of half of them. Some people cycle through things, wear them, sell them. I’m not one of those people. Once something is in my wardrobe it only exits for a couple reasons.

1. It doesn’t fit and I don’t care to alter it.
2. It isn’t something I strongly liked in the first place (either something from a lucky pack, or something I bought on an impulse, typically)
3. I’m replacing it with a cut/color of the same thing I liked better.

I’m really bad with time, but I sat down and did some checks and I think I bought my first dress in 2009 (but it might have been 2008; I’m not 100% sure anymore). So, that makes five years of wearing the style. The first year, I’m 90% sure I only owned bodyline main pieces.
My wardrobe looked a little like this:

Of those things, I sold the strawberry bag this past year (because I had an Innocent World one, plus both an AP and a Baby bag in red, and I didn’t wear it much any more; it’s actually a pretty nice bag, honestly), and I sold the high waist skirt which I had in yellow and haven’t worn since the year I bought it. I’ve sold off the blouse that went with the gingham bunny set, but I kept the JSK for nostalgia. The sax shoes have been repainted a brighter blue, the red shoes are so scuffed I had to paint over the worst of the marks before rufflecon this year, and the white bunny eared blouse got stained sort of pink in the wash a bit ago. The sax star bag I still have, and like, but I think it’s an AP replica and I’m not sure how I feel about it these days. I still have the bodyline candy print skirt, and I still love it, though I haven’t worn it in quite some time.

I don’t have a record of what my wardrobe looked like again until the end of 2011. By then my wardrobe had swelled to about 45 dresses and skirts. 18 of them were red/pink, 9 were sax/navy, 8 were brown, 6 were black and the rest were one-offs in other colors. I sold my first few things in 2011; an AP lucky pack JSK that didn’t fit, and quite a few things from the first few innocent world lucky packs I’d bought.

From 2009-2011 the only reason I sold anything was because it didn’t fit, and I was buying cheap stuff or lucky pack stuff, so I accumulated a lot of beige and rose pink that didn’t suit me at all.

In 2012 I sold nothing, and I bought a lot. My wardrobe swelled up to about 75 dresses/skirts, not counting things I’d put aside to sell (at least 25 items). I was trying to take sales photos, but I was slow about it and I bought things faster than I got the info together for sales listings.

By mid 2013, I realized I needed to just stop, list a chunk of stuff, and get it sold, and not keep trying to list everything I wanted to sell at once. I sold a grand total of 5 things.

At the beginning of 2014, my wardrobe had grown to over 100 dresses/skirts, not counting another 40-some I’d put aside to sell. Late in the spring of 2014, I realize I needed help getting it all out the door, and sat down with my girlfriend Cinnabunnylol, and she offered to help me by shipping out my sales items if I listed them. So, I started a huge closet purge, which is actually still going on. I took almost everything beige, mint, yellow or dusty pink from my closet and we put it up for sale. Along with 90% of the main pieces I’d gotten on taobao, almost all my Meta, almost all my Baby the Stars Shine bright, all the blouses I had that were too small, 2/3 of my skirts (they don’t really flatter me), and some things I had in multiple cuts/colorways.

We establish a LM account as a consignment shop and made close to 100 listings. So far, we’ve sold 78 items there, and then another 10-15 were sold at Rufflecon, and a good handful were sold at Anime Boston.

We just moved, and in the spare room there is a rack, which is still full of items to sell, but it’s a much smaller number of things than it was when I started. (Now that that’s all over, hopefully I’ll have more time to write).

I started out with a wardrobe that was bright sax and red sweet lolita, which, in the middle got a bit more pastel sweet and a bit of pastel classic and darker classic.

Now, it’s mostly bright colored sweet lolita with a lot of red still, and there is more richly colored classic. It’s getting big again, and I’ll probably sell off a few of the things in there, but I think I’ve reach a point where I’ve solidified my personal style.

If we average it out, that’s 150 dresses/skirts over 5 years, at a buy rate of 30 dresses/skirts per year and a sell rate of ~7 for dresses/skirts. With another 7 per year still waiting to be sold. Ouch. I better start relisting things on lacemarket again soon.