Miss Jo's San Francisco

AS PART OF HER SAN FRANCISCO STAYCATION, MISS JO HOPPED OVER TO Japantown for a festival celebrating the opening of a Japanese pop art and film center, New People, which devotes half the second floor to selling frilly Lolita fashions.

Startling cute, this Japanese street fashion perplexed Miss Jo, given the culture’s overall spare design aesthetic. With all the lacy Lolita parasols, she felt like she’d walked into a production of “Show Boat.”

Now this was an aspect of San Francisco fashion Miss Jo didn’t know about, and which begged the question: What’s up with all the petticoats and knee socks and why call the look Lolita ?

“The term Lolita only refers to the child-like nature of some of the clothes and is also used because of the beauty or cuteness of the name,” explains lolitafashion, which distances the trend from Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial 1955 novel, Lolita.
“Lolita Fashion is emphatically not about looking sexy and is instead about looking cute or elegant,” the website underscores.

However you define it, these young ladies, ranging from adolescents to early 20s, are into some serious dress up, which has rules for a proper outfit and how to wear your hair— in pigtails, curled or styled up— never a pony tail.

There are also many levels of Lolita dressing—- you needn’t go all out—as well as Lolita sub-styles, like Gothic Lolita, Country Lolita, Sailor Lolita and Punk Lolita.
Perhaps you’ve spotted Lolitas in your town, since most U.S. and European cities have devotees. For some, Lolita is an entire lifestyle of pursuing beauty as seen through a curious lens of 18th-century European Rococo painting, which was heavy on pudgy cherubs and carefree aristocratic ladies with rosy skin and full skirts, like the Lolita role model in the painting, above left, by Thomas Gainsborough, Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire.

San Francisco’s Lolita ladies at the J-Pop festival were turned out to a T, but they weren’t in the least self conscious. They were life-like fashion dolls with big smiles, enjoying themselves.


Here’s a video from the 1936 movie “Show Boat,” with a classic score by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein (lyrics), with an early Lolita singing “Can’t Stop Loving that Man of Mine.” (Pardon the Portuguese subtitles !)