Lolita fashion
In "IC in a Sunflower" and all her works, Mihara uses character designs incorporating Lolita fashion—a clothing style influenced by the Rococo style and the Victorian and Edwardian eras. She explained that that particular style conveys the duality of her characters: "It's about showing the delicate balance of 'delicate, yet strong,' or 'selfish and wild, yet lustful.'" Mihara has been involved with the shaping of the Gothic Lolita style—a subset of the Lolita fashion which incorporates dark colors—through her artwork; she illustrated the first eight covers of the fashion magazine-book "Gothic &amp; Lolita Bible" and later returned to illustrating the covers with the twenty-seventh volume in fall 2007.