Mori Girl Style

Back in 2006, Mori Girl (or Mori Kei) style emerged as a fashion aesthetic. It was started by a Japanese influencer named Choco when one of her friends commented that her outfit looked like she lived among the creatures of the forest. The term Mori Girl translates literally to forest girl and features an aesthetic that was designed to make you look like you just stepped out of a magical woodland environment.

The fashion trend boomed for about a decade but never really gained much traction outside of Japan. Many designers that focused on this aesthetic as well as the original Mori Girl blogs started to fade out around 2017, which was right around the time that I discovered this style genre.

The main characteristics of this style include natural fabrics with muted earthy color palettes and lots of loose oversized layers with whimsical vintage details. All of these things appeal to my personal style. However, when I saw the young teeny tiny Japanese women who represented the Mori Girl style, I never thought I could pull off this aesthetic in my middle aged plus sized body.

Until recently…when I discovered For the Mori Girls. Kelsea is a fashion visionary who epitomizes the Mori Girl style in a beautiful body that is much more similar to mine than the original Mori Girls of the early 2000s. I have been obsessed with her reels which feature the cutest woodland styles and include empowering body positive messages that we could all benefit from.

I certainly benefited from her messages of body positivity, realizing that I can wear whatever style aesthetic I want regardless of the age and shape of my body. Certainly, I won’t look the same as a petite 20-something Japanese girl who weighs half my body weight since I am a tall big-bodied 50-something white woman. But that doesn’t mean I can’t wear whatever the heck I want and still look cute.

So Kelsea inspired me to revisit this Mori Girl aesthetic and I am loving it! Let me break it down for you…

First, I found this 2017 article, An Introduction to Mori Kei, which offers a really helpful guide to creating this style aesthetic. While every Mori Girl will style her wardrobe in her own unique way, there are a few basic characteristics that seem to always emerge in each outfit.

In keeping with the woodland theme, Mori Girls embrace natural fabrics like cotton, linen, and lace as well as crochet and macrame details. Creams, whites, browns, and beiges dominate the Mori Girl color palette but blues, greens, and yellows in subdued hues make fabulous accent colors for this style aesthetic. If there are prints in a Mori Girl outfit, they tend to be nature-inspired like floral, botanical, and woodland animal patterns.

For accessories, the Mori Girl usually leans towards nature-themed and vintage jewelry as well as practical footwear that is conducive to wandering in the woods. Makeup is kept minimal and hairstyles lean toward the practical and natural as well. By following their own individual energy, Mori Girls make their detailed outfits look simple, effortless, and approachable while maintaining their own unique and whimsical style.

One of the key components of this style genre are the layers. Of course, you know how I love layering. One layer is never enough for me. I have way too many clothes that still need to be worn for me to limit myself to wearing only one layer at a time anyway!

For my interpretation of Mori Girl style, I worked with a neutral color palette of earthy tans, yellows, and greens. Over the past few years, I have been finding a lot of these lightweight handkerchief hem dresses and tunics in thrift stores. They always feature unique colors and beautiful embroidery details that work so well with the Mori Girl aesthetic. When I spot them on my thrifting adventures, I can’t seem to ever leave them behind and have accumulated a small collection of similar dresses.

However, I have struggled to style these rather shapeless dresses in a way that is flattering on my body. Last summer, I tried a similar style dress over a pair of loose trousers and I loved it so much that it literally opened up all sorts of styling options for me.

For this outfit, I layered this beautiful buttery yellow dress over an old pair of tan linen blend pants. The dress features a subtle white tie dye pattern and gorgeous deep brown floral embroidery. I really wanted to wear a pair of dark brown pants with this outfit but I did not own any at the time of these photographs. I do now though because last week I bought a lovely pair of crinkle crepe harem pants in a stunning deep peppercorn color that are going to be so good this summer. I might need to restyle this outfit with the new pants because I think they will look so much better than the light tan ones.

Another problem with these dresses is the unflattering neckline. To remedy that issue, I layered a new little cropped tee shirt cardigan over the dress, added some macrame earrings, and then piled on a bunch of necklaces with both woodland and vintage vibes. I bookended the outfit with my wide brimmed olive green straw hat and my olive green Furkenstocks.

While I wasn’t wholly pleased with the color combination (because I really wanted the dark brown pants), I was completely happy with the overall look and how well it illustrates the whimsical woodland Mori Girl style on a fat old city girl like myself!

Are there any style genres that you have been wanting to try but something is holding you back? Now is the time. If you have the clothes, you might as well wear them!

Keeping it on the edge,

Shelbee