EGL Throwback Thursday: April 2006

Welcome to a second exciting edition of EGL's Throwback Thursday! Since 2008 wasn't old enough for some people last week, let's go back even further to April 2006. This was actually a pain in the butt because oooh boy EGL was a mess back then. EGL averaged about 25 posts a day, sometimes as many as 40, most of which were sales posts with really weird titles.

And speaking of old sales posts, check out a couple of these: This post is a hodgepodge of Jpunk items, G&LBs, and some Gloomy Bear slippers and it has 87 comments, here's a girl attempting to sell a dress and a bonnet and getting 47 comments, here are 2 G&LBs being sold with 31 comments. Now, this isn't 30 people lining up for their chance to throw money at you to buy a $14 mook, this is just people bumbling their invoices, asking questions upon questions, asking for closeups of things that don't even need closeups, people commenting just to say they liked someone's icon, and hemming and hawing over whether or not they should buy it. I do not miss this about selling on here at all xD

While we're still on the topic of selling, does anyone remember the old old database? Here's a post about getting it started! You can even see the ancient ruins of the old database! I had honestly completely forgotten about this until I saw this post!

While I couldn't find a topic about it on EGL (it might be there, buried under all the sales posts, questions, and completely random "silly" posts.) I believe that April, or possibly late March, was the month that Angelic Pretty came out with Pastel a la Mode! There's an old archived "Angelic Party" with Kokusyoku Sumire on their website and everyone is wearing it! At this point EGL had not really caught onto this new Sweet Lolita thing Angelic Pretty was doing, most likely because I don't believe you could even buy AP outside of Japan without a shopping service at this point. I think that it was still just Meta and BtSSB available in the US at this point! Here's a really adorable excited review of a BtSSB order from a way too lucky 12 year old at the time. The rest of us were mostly just buying crap off of ebay and Bodyline through Cosmates at the time.

Here's a Lolita seamstress from back then who provided a pretty interesting service of creating full outfits based on how often you wanted to wear Lolita. For $60 or $70 you could get a cutsew, petticoat, and simple skirt. This service was probably a boon to a lot of Lolitas at the time!

As an example of the comm's constant know-it-all snark: here's a post where some girl reviews some photos in an old goth mag (The mag in question seems to be Meltdown #17)The photos no longer exist but I can imagine they were very typica "gothy scary doll" look that was very typical pre-2006 when Western goth mags talked about Lolita. These girls are pretty ruthless with their commentary though and will have absolutely none of that xD 150+ comments, wow. Also note the "not 56k friendly" note at the top, I'm willing to bet people don't even know what that means any more xD. To balance out this crazyness, here's a very reasonable "My Personal top 5 tips for dressing Lolita", these things are all still pretty relevant today, but a few particular no-no's of the time are mentioned, like the fact that #5 is just a list of regular goth things that people liked to throw in with Lolita at the time.

Around this time Punk Lolita was still pretty big, and also really confusing. This era, to me, was like the confusing teenaged years of the style outside of Japan. Everyone was very cranky all the time, everyone constantly felt the need to be both edgy and to be accepted as a "real Lolita", so trying to define the fashion and seperate it from the "anything goes" years that came before. So this post about trying to define Punk Lolita was very interesting.

The communtie's cranky edgyness finally got to the mod team at the time, here's a post reminding people to stop acting like asses to each other and to stop posting random crap. Remember when we had to tell you guys you were posting too much p(´⌒｀｡q)

And last but not least, here's a really adorable photoshoot of a well dressed Lolita for 2006. I am pretty sure she's wearing an Ebay dress, but it's still adorably charming.

What were you doing in April of 2006? I don't think I had yet to attend my first Lolita meetup and I hadn't even yet made this LJ username! I am pretty sure I had temporarily put aside Lolita for BJDs and was probably obsessing over dressing them in the Lolita I never thought I could have xD