When it comes to lolita fashion, trying to fill the gaps in an experience from a time when internet was completely different is difficult. Eventually you look at every early volume of Gothic & Lolita Bible, KERA, FRUiTS, as many CUTiE issues as you can find, random images dug up by other people... But then there are still missing pieces. If print media can't fill those gaps (or rather, you have a hard time letting go of money that could go to a super cute clothing item in order to buy this print media...), the next best thing seems to look for digital traces posted by people at the time.

Maybe it's just me, but filtering Google search results to a specific time frame feels pretty much useless. I can't remember how I found out about Internet Archive, it must have been something related to Lolibrary or lolitahistory.com, but I've found old brand website domains to put through the Wayback Machine, only to see a good number of older images broken. I never thought about searching for personal websites, and frankly I'm not sure how they were initially found with how frequently pages are missing (I do remember there were some old street snaps with site URLs though)... But I happened to see sullensixxspence's blog post Digital Time Capsule, and it provided me with the start I was looking for.

Through Mochimochi's links page, I was able to find various other homepages centered on lolita fashion. I knew from previous attempts how high the likelihood of old pages missing images was, but regardless, one of the biggest heartbreaks was finding the site of someone called Erika. The enter page immediately provided an interesting discovery, Metamorphose's 1999 bouquet print high-waisted OP in what looks like the blue colorway.

But the lolita section was inaccessible through the site directly, so I found a workaround using the Internet Archive's file-search-under-a-domain feature, which allowed me to access an HTML file with a name indicating it was what I was looking for. Yay! But what seemed promising initially eventually led to... nothing. Because there were no images saved (now I know to check for that first...). I can only imagine what they looked like from the garment names... (；▽；)

It wasn't all disappointment though. I found a surprising number of sites with images in general, and a decent amount of things I've never seen before. I'll just be going over the highlights from a number of sites, and provide links for anyone who feels like looking around too.

Probably my favorite site so far was by someone called Shirabe. I discovered their site through a lolita community site, La Pucelle. There were many surviving images in their gallery, and some in their diary, but most notably there were images of a black and white Metamorphose JSK, and what I assume to be the 1999 coat with a cape.

Here's a link to the closet page. I also really recommend checking out the gallery, it's super cute!

Another site worth checking out is by someone called Hiyori. Almost all the wardrobe images are broken besides some Metamorphose pieces and the handmade items (which are cool!), but the gallery has a handful of images saved.

A tragedy...

I love pink and white! (^^♪

I also noticed a statement and button on this site about distinguishing lolita fashion from cosplay:

I can't really explain well why this stuck out to me. I think most lolitas probably have gotten a "what anime are you from," comment at least once. It's possible to feel positively about cosplay, but also get irritated when people assume your clothes are not who you really are... I'm not sure if that's exactly what they were feeling, but that's what popped up in my mind.

The next notable site I found is Little Alice, the webmaster goes by Himeno. I got scared by the automatic download, but all the sites that mention something about a MIDI soundtrack seem to have it happen. Or maybe I'm in danger...

Anyway, they have a lot of images of Emily Temple and Emily Temple Cute pieces, and that seems to be their focus in style, so I was surprised to notice the (not broken) images of old Angelic Pretty pieces, and a BABY, the Stars Shine Bright JSK with that old lace they used to use!

I've never seen this one before! There seems to be a ribbon on the waist, but even if I brighten the image, the quality is low so I can't really make anything out. There's also apparently buttons on the back, which is certainly unusual for Angelic Pretty.

BABY～♪

Not only do I know this one, I have the other release from that year (different lace) in black and white, but every time I look at it, I'm still wowed by the beauty... ヽ(；▽；)ノ♥

I started noticing many of the sites I found had something about "Raphael" in their descriptions, but didn't really know what it was until I found Angel Träne. There is a section they made dedicated to their thoughts about lolita fashion, and they describe Raphael's guitarist Kazuki as the reason for finding it. They were apparently talking with a friend who said Kazuki likes lolita fashion, and they interpreted it as "Kazuki likes girls who wear lolita fashion" rather than "Kazuki wants to wear lolita fashion!" (≧▽≦) Combined with hearing that he doesn't like short hair (and the webmaster had short hair, this made me a little sad..), they eventually saw a video with Kazuki wearing frilly clothes (not sure if it was lolita fashion specifically, but I think he wears it in the video for "夢より素敵な"), and after attending a live and seeing all the lolitas there, they felt really excited about all the cute clothes, and decided they'd be a lolita too.

(From happyholidays98 on Tumblr)

I feel lucky to have learned about Raphael through these sites. One of the site owner's writings dedicated to Kazuki talks about wanting to let more people know about Raphael, so I hope I can echo their feelings and also let more people know about them.

In addition to plenty of Raphael-related content, I also found images of Metamorphose's ballerina shoes, which I had seen plenty of times in old photos but never close-up.

They're apparently from spring 2000.

A common but unfortunate sight... There's a background set in the code, but the file wasn't archived.

I also found a site called Psycho Garden, which had most images broken, but what stood out to me was their thoughts on lolita. From what I understood (and I'm not fluent so I could be wrong), they think of lolita fashion as a world of self-satisfaction, and people who hate it as being in an unrelated world. To me if people can't at least be neutral toward my tastes, they kind of stop existing to me. Why should I care about people who don't get it? It just kind of reminded me of that. I like seeing people just do what they want. ^ω^）

This site, Material of Flower, has a suprisingly intact layout (I love it!). I realized I've actually seen some pictures from here on Lolibrary, I'm not sure why the rest of the things on here aren't already there too, but notable discoveries (for my tastes) are a BABY cutsew from the 90s, and one of those old Metamorphose skirts with the fully elastic waistband!

Even though a lot of images are unfortunately broken, the layout is so cute, I think it's worth it to try clicking around anyway. (❁´ω`❁)

The last site I'll be sharing for now is Feminism (I love the name (✿˘艸˘✿) ). I would say the content is a bit controversial, there are some images with blood, rope, a gun, etc. I definitely know there are lots of people who enjoy this sort of edgy style though. You have to kind of dig through to find stuff "naturally," so I ended up using the tool that returns files under a certain domain to find all the images. Some of them show Metamorphose's 1999 velveteen babydoll JSK in the ivory and black colorway, and what looks like white rocking horse ballerina shoes. Very my style～♡

If you don't mind the sight of blood-like stuff, there's a section dedicated to a lolita party from 2002, with lots of cute Metamorphose outfits. Looking at it, I can't help but feel so anxious for those clothes... (ﾟoﾟ;

Whew, I spent more time than expected working on this! (*´ο`*) I actually have a quiz tomorrow (technically today, because it's past midnight now...), so yiiikess... Not looking forward to that... (´ε｀；)