I didn’t quite realise that it’s been well over a month since I last did this. To be honest with you, I found this dress a lot trickier than I thought it would be: it lends itself very well to all kinds of OTT coords, but as soon as I tried to think of something different than this I hit a wall. Which is a shame since AP’s Crystal Dream Carnival Tiered JSK is a dream dress of mine and I’d love to have more ways of wearing it. I’ll keep thinking on this, and I’ll hopefully get some more pieces that’d work with this dress and the colours in it, but in the meantime here are the four outfits that I came up with for now.


Look 1: Casual Elegance

| offbrand cardigan and socks | An*tai*na shoes | Chocomint
star clip | Imperial Fiddlesticks headbow |

My first instinct was “Can I dress this JSK down?”. Even though it’s the wonder and business of the print that attracted me to it in the first place, dressing is down would be one way to get more wear out of this. This is designed for a slightly warmer day, but by layering white tights with the ankle socks would make it more appropriate for a cooler one too. The only reason I went with these shoes is because I don’t have flat ones in a matching colour, but navy or gold tea parties would work great too.

Look 2: Carnival of Sax

| Infanta Moon's Elegy blouse | AP Harlequinade OTKs | AP
Dolly Chiffon headbow | AP Crystal Dream Carnival ring |
Chocomint ring | Deary heels | Etsy necklace |

I couldn’t resist doing an OTT take on this that it deserves. Navy and sax work very well in my opinion, making the whole a little bit more… celestial or sky-like I guess. I love these OTKs and they seem to be a perfect match as they contain little accents of the same lavender shade that’s present in the print as well. I don’t know, I just like the way it looks, I think it does the print justice.

Look 3: Simple Sweet

| AP Creamy Shirring blouse | Meta Heart Ladder LaceOTKs | Soufflesong Ice Prism blouse bow | Etsy barette
and gingerbread man ring | Risu Rose heart ring | offbrand
boots |

As I was thinking what else I could do with this dress I decided to try a simple Sweet look. Technically this JSK comes under the Sweet substyle, so why not? It allows the print to come to the fore undisturbed, even of the look itself isn’t the most imaginative one. It could definitely be improved, for example with better shoes (tea parties would be best) or different socks (I wanted to avoid using the Twinkle Carnival ones which I always use with this JSK , but all the typically Sweet socks I have wouldn’t go with this colour palette), but it’s not a bad work in progress.

Look 4: Winter Wonderland

| Soufflesong Ice Prism blouse | Meta Snow Crystal OTKs |
AP Crystal Dream Carnival headbow | Chocomint star
clip | offbrand boots |

I actually took these photos ages ago, during the first run of taking photos for this particular post – all the other looks I’ve changed/improved on, but this one stayed. For a good reason, as this is something that I plan on wearing for Winter ILD, with a few more pieces which have since arrived (and potentially with different head accessories, but I need to do the actual dry run for that first). Again, it’s a pretty OTT look, which goes best with this print, but at the same time it’s quite classic and despite the socks having a print and plenty of details on the sleeves, none of this obscures the print.


I’ll definitely be thinking of more imaginative ways to style this dress, I don’t want it to be exclusively for OTT looks. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them! And hopefully the next instalment of this kind of posts will be sooner than in 5-6 weeks.