CNN
 — 

Ella hadn’t found a style that felt like her until a Lolita waltzed into her workplace in California’s Bay Area.

Not a “Lolita” in the Nabokovian sense, the woman was an adult dressed in Lolita fashion, a style of dress popularized in Japan in the mid-1990s and informed by the Victorian era and ornate Rococo art movement. The typical Lolita coord is unabashedly feminine, consisting of petticoats, ruffly layered dresses and delicate accessories.

Ella was transported. She’d grown up reading shōjo manga, or “girls’ comics,” and drawing art based on the Japanese countercultural styles she saw within them — the clothes, she assumed, were “very cute but unattainable” in America. She was fascinated by makeup but didn’t see herself in the “mature” looks championed by American media.

(CNN is referring to Ella by her first name only, as Lolitas can be harassed online by those who misunderstand or fetishize their practise.)

Her youthful obsession realized in front of her, Ella was inspired to buy her first piece of Lolita fashion in 2015, from the popular Lolita e-tailer Angel Pretty. She started out as a “lone Lolita” — she wore the clothes, but she didn’t know any other Lolitas.