Mini Lolita Fashion History Lesson: MILK
Today, MILK is generally known as an 'otome' or 'girly' brand, and many of their modern items don't look like what modern lolita think of as lolita.
A recent MILK collection
However, in the late 80s and early 90s, MILK was considered to be one of the quintessential Lolita brands.
1990s lolita wearing MILK
In a 1994 zipper interview about the history of lolita fashion in the brand representative "I think what is now called lolita fashion is the fashion that milk has been making for a long time."
MILK was founded in 1970 by Hitomi Okawa (大川ひとみ). When Hitomi Okawa started as a designer there were not many DC brands yet and ready to wear fashion was really just starting to become more widespread in Japan. Okawa attended an art university in Kyoto because of a love of drawing that started in elementary school. She used to draw illustrations of girls and make things like paper dolls. At the age of 11, she drew many pictures of the same clothes and changed the patterns (polka dots, checks, flowers). She grew up the daughter of a doctor, in an affluent home where her mother would read magazines like Harper's Bazaar with 1950s and 1960s American fashion. She also looked at American fashion catalogs as a child, and cites this study of clothing in magazines and catalogs as her earliest sort of "studying" of fashion.
50s/60s Harper's Bazaar
In addition to drawing inspiration from the 50s & 60s Harper's Bazaar & American clothing catalogs, she also drew inspiration from military uniforms and how they have custom buttons and custom fabric and details like that, as well as current trends in London and Tokyo as the brand continued to develop. When she started however, she says that she was the only one making this sort of cute girly clothing in Japan and she felt like she had to make it because no one else was making what she wanted to wear.
After graduating from Seian College of Art and Design, Department of Design, she started MILK in Harajuku. She wanted to start in the coolest place possible, so she decided on Central Apartment.
MILK Shop Front in the 70s, Central Apartment
She had come to Harajuku when she was either in High School or her first year of University and had stood in the middle of the pedestrian bridge right off Harajuku station, and she looked down at Omotesando and thought "Here is the coolest place, I want to be here!", and that's why she chose that location. The Bridge doesn't exist any more, it was torn down in 2011. She wasn't aware at the time that Central Apartment was a popular place for creators, she just thought that street was nice and that Central Apartment was modern and cool. In a 2021 interview she confessed that she sometimes still goes up to the pedestrian bridge on the Yoyogi Park side and looks at Omotesando, and when she does, she feels the same way she did when she was 20 years old.
Central Apartment (原宿セントラルアパート) was initially an apartment complex built in Harajuku in 1958 at the intersection of Meiji-dori. It was initially built for special international travelers like US military personnel. In the mid 1960s/early 1970s, the lower floors were converted into stores with offices in the upper apartment floors.
The Coffee shop Leon on the first floor was a popular spot with creative people. There were also shops like Mademoiselle Nonnon launched by designer Taro Aramaki which sold French style clothing and lots of horizontal stripes. Mademoiselle Nonnon is considered to be the source of the border (horizontal stripe) trend in Japan.
Initially, "MILK", was expensive and unrealistic for everyday wear, so it was mainly used as a stage costume for idols, however, people started wearing Milk as everyday clothing as time went on.
MILK also experimented with a Bridal line in the 70s as well.
While their runway looks were generally a bit more loud than the way the pieces would have been worn in real life, you can see some prairie revival influence their early 70s items as well as some silhouettes in the '76 collection that are starting to look more lolita-esque.
Here are a few runway examples from the 1980s, note the border print of a carousel in the 1988 collection and the knee length ruffled skirt in the 1982 one.
By the early 1990s, MILK was heavily featured in coordinates worn by young women who considered themselves lolita in magazines like Cutie and Zipper, and was also advertising in those magazines.
1990-1992 Cutie advertisements for MILK
Early 1990s looks from MILK were fairly consistent with what was on offer from similar shops like PRETTY and Shirley Temple.
MILK Coordinates from Nene magazine, 1995
Speaking of Shirley Temple, the founder of Shirley Temple, Rei Yanagawa (柳川れい), worked as a designer for MILK before starting the Shirley Temple children's brand in 1974.
As time went on, lolita fashion started to diverge from the MILK style, while MILK followed their own design concept and look more at current trends in girly fashion. Today, some iconic MILK items like their heart purse are still frequently used in lolita fashion, however, it would be difficult to walk into MILK today and put together a coordinate that would read the same as one made from items at Angelic Pretty.
While goth and punk brands typically have no issue relating themselves to goth or punk fashion, brands popular with lolita have sometimes resisted self-describing themselves as lolita, most likely in an attempt to not alienate non lolita customers, due to lolita fashion having a mixed reputation. MILK, like many other Japanese brands, especially DC brands, maintains that they make MILK style, even though their influence on what we call lolita fashion today, is unmistakable.
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