A Gothic and Lolita Grimoire

Since I’m discussing boy styles tonight, I might as well share with you a day’s set of notes to help clarify some of the ideas I was trying to get across in Gothloli for Men. It’s a wonder I didn’t post them right away…?

The following is dated January 16, 2008. I edited some of it to make more sense.

I truly believe that the names things are recognized by should stay relatively the same worldwide. There’s no use giving something a new name when it already has one…it just makes it more confusing for cross-culture communication. For this reason I’m searching for the Japanese terms used to describe Gothic and Lolita boystyles.

The obvious one is Ouji. Most people know that. But there are so many variations on the boy styles…what criteria exactly does Ouji imply?

While searching, I found other names…

–Ouji-loli
–King
–Unisex
–Uni-mens/Uni-otoko
–Goth-ouji

• My first impression of Ouji, upon finding websites and photos, was that it is a men’s style (and sometimes women wear it too, but it is adult-man-like, not childish like our Kodona).But when I search only for Ouji, or Ouji-kei, I get so many hits that it’s impossible to sift through them all and find the relevant ones. This term is obviously widely used for other things, not just our fashion. For the Ouji-kei search I remember finding a lot about a theater….

  An image search of Ouji turned up a lot of photos of Gackt. (Ouji means Prince, for anyone who might not have known.)

• While Oujiloli seems like an ingenious name, it turns up few relevant webpage hits, and only two pages of images, one of which is a drawing of what I would call a “Sweet Kodona”. That’s it.
• A blog article claims that magazines call this men’s style King, Unisex, or Uni-men (I have to read it more closely), but Unisex turns up many photos of watches (from the same site), Uni-men turns up many photos of diapers, and King turns up a great many random photos, none of which looked anything like boystyle as far as I could tell. In the Unisex search I did find one photo of two young men dressed in Ouji-like attire.
• Gosu-ouji turns up far more relevant hits in the image search, but only three pages of them. While most of them appear Gothloli related, only a handful actually resemble the style I’m looking for.
• For the hell of it, I did an image search for Kodona. I got a ton of hits. Among them were Coolio, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a cute blog, and also some lolita…and I do not mean our kind of lolita. Almost nothing had anything to do with fashion, although I did find one pretty cool cosplayer. I think I also found a photo of someone’s pets having sex. Great.In a regular web search there were several hits, but none of them seem to have to do with fashion. I started getting the impression that whatever it is, kodona = something very cute. Then I found this site (the link is dead as of July 9, 2008)…

  Kodona = an adult who is a child at heart.
  Otomo = an adult who never fully became an adult.

  (These are plays on Kodomo+Otona and Otona+Kodomo.)

  I don’t know how universal this is, but it makes sense considering all those cute hits I was getting.

  I tend to say it’s ok to use the word Kodona for the boyish Ouji styles until we find the proper name, since that’s the name everyone knows it by, but that was under the assumption that Kodona didn’t mean anything in Japanese. If it does, then we should probably stop using it altogether. Kodona seems to be skimming the waters of Burikko (or “fake child”, which is essentially a young adult who acts like an infant in order to be KAWAII, and I think is considered uncool by today’s generation), and that is definitely not something that Gothloli typically embraces. It also seems to be paralleling teenybopper, which MOST definitely not something that Gothloli embraces at all.

  I found this kind of amusing.

  VERY Rough Translation:
  (Ok, this makes a LOT more sense after realizing that parents use this term to describe their teenage children. This is probably a parent talking about her daughter(s)!! That makes me really glad, actually, to know there is not some weird subculture of adults with Peter-Pan syndrome, which was my original impression…)

  QUESTION:
  Recently, there seems to be a lot of “kodona”-chan activity!

  Kodona-chans’ homes seem to be busy with extracurricular activities such as karaoke, purikura, fashion magazines, and videos.

  Aren’t kodona-chan’s minds are on summer vacation activities? (<–confusing line…)

  What extracurricular activities are you in?

  BEST ANSWER:
  What is “kodona”-chan?
  “Child” + “Adult”? A child is a child…

  ANSWER 2:
  wtf is kodona??????????????????????

• I also looked up gothloli ouji and ouji fashion, but for the first I got a lot of auctions and stores, and for the second I just came up with a bunch of random men’s fashion stuff. I guess the word Ouji is really just descriptive, which is probably how Lolita started, or it just doesn’t have as strong an online presence as Lolita.

My conclusions are:
Ouji is a man’s style. Common names are Ouji-kei and Goth-Ouji. Some women wear it too, but they still have a masculine air.

Ouji-loli is a girls’ style. Baby, Meta, and the popular Lolita brands sell this. It’s boyish and a little cute.

Now I am confused…what about those girls’ styles that are boyish, but punk or gothic instead of cute? I wonder if that has a name. Maybe it’s just Goth-ouji or Punk-ouji, or even simply Goth-Punk.