Angelic Pretty, and a good handful of other similar brands, often make clothes in the style of Lolita Fashion. This is a style originally inspired by historical fashion eras such as the Victorian and Rococo periods, as well as Western fashion in the 50's and 60's. It's evolved a lot over the years, and has spread across the world, sprouting many large communities, including where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The fashion is typically divided into 3 substyles: Sweet, Classic, and Gothic.

I err on the more elegant Classic side. For the curious, here's a a couple snaps of my last outfit.


Here is an article from the Victoria and Albert Museum that explains a little more about the fashion. They erroneously dump a few other Japanese street styles with Lolita fashion around the middle, but the first half is fairly accurate!

In the late 2000's through the early 2010's, the fashion departed from its former relative simplicity, and took a turn for the sweet. Pastels and over-the-top prints on dresses and skirts became all the rage.  Angelic Pretty began putting out collections with names like Sugary Carnival, Whipped Magic, and Decoration Dream. These collections often contained printed pieces featuring designs such as desserts, fruit, or cute animals. It was a little ridiculous, but a lot of fun. Other brands participated in the Over the Top Sweet trend, but it really began with, and was driven by, AP.

Angelic Pretty in Kera Magazine

Because of the niche-nature of Lolita, the biggest gathering-places of those who wear the fashion have been online. Up until recently, the main point of contact was a Livejournal page (it takes us awhile to modernize). In 2011, during the height of the over-the-top sweet craze, Livejournal user meiki posted this

Check out the original post here

I provided all that context so some of the playful ribbing nature of this picture would come across to someone who's never heard of the fashion. I stumbled across this again recently, and thought it would be fun to turn this into a program.

For this project, I used a Windows form in Visual Studio. I've been using C++ for a grand total of a month now for homework assignments, so I figured I should try it for other things, as well. Why did I use a Windows form? Not sure yet, but I learned that the Visual Studio designer crashes a lot with this framework.

Here's how it works. Enter your birth month, the first letter of your first name, and your favorite color, and it spits out your personalized OTT Sweet print name!

XAML Side

The XAML is uninteresting, and simply contains the controls. There are 3 combo boxes, one button, one image control, and a few labels. The combo boxes have been hard-coded with the data for selection.

The C++ side

I created a button click event handler. Because the code only does one real thing, all the logic lives here. The integers selectedMonth, selectedLetter, and selectedColor hold the selected index for each combo box. There is one switch statement for each combo box. Based on the case of the selected index in each combo box, the strings month, letter, and color, are populated appropriately.



Finally, the string printName is given the value of the strings month, letter, and color concatenated. This string is used to populate a label. The label is empty until this point, so it shows up only after the user fills in the boxes and clicks the button.




The fashion has been a part of my life for many years now, and is rather sentimental to me. I intend to keep looking for ways to build silly programs related to one of my dearest hobbies!