Hello Lace

Hello Lace

300px Screenshot of ______ homepage on
Available in	LANGUAGE
Founded	16 June 2010
Current status	Closed

Hello Lace was an English-language website that documented lolita fashion items. It was known for having a very aesthetically pleasing layout, the ability to browse all entries for a brand on a single page as images, and for it's informational pages. Hello Lace is now defunct, and the URL hosts malware.

History

Hello Lace was released by LJ user Boxx2Genetica on Livejournal on June 16, 2010. The release notice read as follows:

Hello! I'd like to present a project I've been working on since last year: hellolace. Some of you may have been aware of this, as I have been contacting quite a few people for submissions. The initial idea was to make a more updated and less opinionated resource for lolita information, then I decided to make a lolita items database that everyone could benefit from. Lastly, I thought it'd be nice to have a gallery of beautiful inspirational lolitas and other things. While Daily Lolita works as such, Livejournal isn't the most organized place.

Right now it's in beta, meaning it's unfinished but viewable. Many pages are already written, but need some touchups before I post them. I've decided to post this now, as with the appearance of the amazing girls of Lolibrary, I didn't want my months of work put to waste. The girls at Lolibrary are of course welcome to take part of the information and images I post as well.

INFORMATION

I've tried to write a more objective view of lolita fashion, which may not be everyone's cup of tea. Styles are referred to by their Japanese names, and the "guides" are just overviews of each style and its contents. The style overviews will include more rare substyles, such as Pirate Lolita, Fairy Lolita, Deco Lolita, etc. The information written also differs between the Western and Asian versions of lolita fashion at certain points.

This part of the site is very incomplete at this point, and a lot is to be added shortly.

LOLITA ITEMS DATABASE AKA THE WARDROBE

I decided to do a gallery-style database, with each item displayed as a thumbnail leading to a new page with the official information of the item. Everything is translated from Japanese, and while I've tried keeping everything as accurate as possible, if you spot any mistakes you are more than welcome to send me a note about it through the contact form. All items have all official stock photos I've been able to gather. In worst-case scenarios, I have gathered images from official blogs or second-hand sites.

All items are databased, listed by brand and type, and sortable into years. You can also use the search box to search for a specific item if you know its name. Right now there's pretty much only AP up, but I have several thousand files of several hundred items to be added still.

LOLITA INSPIRATION GALLERY

The inspiration gallery currently features lovely lolitas I have encountered. If you think you could be an inspiration to other lolitas, feel free to contact me! However, notice your photos must keep a certain quality. I will most likely post a list of guidelines for this on the website later on.

Note: If you are one of the lolitas I've contacted and you don't see yourself in the gallery yet; don't worry, I'll post up the rest of you soon.

I am also working on a second part with inspirational hairstyles suitable for lolita.

GRAPHICS

I will also have a section for lolita-related graphics for everyone's enjoyment. So far it's just 100x100 icons, but if anyone has suggestions, feel free to share.

Well, that's it for now. Feel free to share your comments, opinions and suggestions (if there is something you'd love to see on the site). Thank you for surviving this wall of text!

Hello Lace used a closed model where only staff members of the site could submit content. A list of staff members was posted on the credits page, but by 2011, this only consisted of two names: Stanzi1791/Marleen, a contributor, and Hiroko the host and initial developer. Those two staff members and the site owner Boxx2Genetica/Linda are the only publicly announced staff members. The staff members names were not associated with the entries in a public facing way, so even though some of the the posts imply the team may have been larger, there is no public record of how large the staff was. In 2012, Christina (Blogger at Ramble Rori) was added to the list as a programmer.

By July 1, 2010, the site had 337 items listed, with 270 of them being Angelic Pretty dresses.

On November 20, 2010, Boxx2Genetica posted to EGL seeking a PHP/MySQL developer, as Hello Lace's previous developer was not available for personal reasons. On January 6, 2011, Boxx2Genetica posted to EGL seeking worn item photos to add to items listings, which would be a new feature.

On April 29, 2011, Boxx2Genetica posted to EGL looking for French and German translators for a V2 of hellolace that was in development. The new version was intended to feature translations of the website content into other languages including Dutch, French, German, Dutch and Swedish. This would not have included the wardrobe, which held the item listings. Around this time, there was also a shift towards writing the name as Hello Lace, instead of hellolace.

On July 6, 2011, Hello Lace announced that they had started a twitter with the first post being from July 2, 2011. On July 16, 2011, Hello Lace started to record items from Enchantic Enchantilly.

On July 20, 2011, they posted to twitter that they were looking for more contributors, and stated that they had staff to cover the classic brands. On August 1st, 2011, they announced their attached forum via twitter. The forum would become the easiest way to contact the staff about errors in listings, or questions. They also started a washing information list using information copied from EGL and asked for people to contribute via the forum. However, there were only 17 contribution replies over the life of the feature.

On August 14, 2011, they tweeted that they had just added the 6,000th wardrobe entry. On August 15, 2011, they announced that they would start archiving h.naoto items.

On September 5, 2011, they tweeted that they were taking a short break, followed by a tweet on September 20th, 2011 indicating that the site would go on Hiatus until the design change. At this time, there were 6137 item entries. On October 3, 2011, commenting on items was shut off.

However, when they closed, there were only 5,688 items.