It's not a cry for help or a cry for attention.
It's an appreciation for something beyond ourselves.
It's like we want to be the fairy princess that we've always read about
and we can be, so why not?
I describe my personal style as "Living Doll."
Dolls are really appealing to me because they're a blank canvas,
and that's kind of how I see myself.
You take a doll and you can make up any type of story.
You can dress them any way you want.
You can paint them.
You can smash them.
You can treat them very, very delicately.
I go by Toshi all the time whether I'm, like,
in normal mode or Toshi mode.
The character Toshi is just happy and bubbly,
all over the place, rolling on the floor, climbing stuff, giggling...
I started when I was, like, nine or ten.
We started drawing and painting and then that evolved into makeup,
and so that kind of let me become the characters that I would play with
as imaginary friends.
You know, I could finally, like, join them.
When I first started dressing up,
I think my parents weren't really quite sure.
I'm sure they just thought it was, like, a goth phase.
I got in a lot of trouble because I wore blue lipstick to school,
which is now one of my signature colors — it's still the same color blue.
I even started a petition to be able to wear cat ears in the classroom,
but I got denied because they were distracting,
and then it just kind of snowballed out of control.
Now I'm where I am today making a career out of it.
When I was younger, I think I definitely started dressing up,
one, because I was exploring myself,
but at a point, it definitely got twisted and it became an identity.
The character was who I wanted to be, and not my real self.
After moving to New York and meeting so many other performers,
I'm realizing it's so chill to just be, like, a regular human, and then
you can be the sparkly, fairy doll creature, whatever, whenever you want to be.
It's my right to choose what I want to look like that day
instead of, like, a forced compulsion to be a freak,
instead of just feeling beautiful in anything that I'm in.
A lot of my influence is from Japanese subcultures —
the Decora subculture and the Lolita subculture, specifically —
and fashion styles found in the Harajuku and Shibuya areas.
I pretty much hang out with people who accept me as I am
or encourage my style.
A huge part of this subculture, any subculture, is really all about the community.
I go to a lot of anime conventions, one in particular called RuffleCon.
It's a Lolita and alternative fashion-specific convention.
There's a tea party,
there's a fashion show,
there are panels to learn how to style wigs and how to do makeup,
so many wonderful people who all share this passion for what they do.
If you don't go out and meet them,
you're never going to find them.
I've met so many of my best friends through fashion events,
through dressing up, through developing our characters together.
There's a lot of young kids, especially, who don't feel like they fit in.
Maybe finding a subculture that is so oddly specific
will be something absolutely life-changing, because I know it was for me.
I think I will definitely dress like this for the rest of my life.
I think it's just going to keep evolving and evolving.
Something resonates within your heart and that theme will continue to run,
no matter what the course is like.
I'll be a doll in the coffin with, like, pink blush!
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