Alice Quartet (also known as Alice Quartet Obbligato) is a Slice of Life Yuri Genre manga created in collaboration by Miyabi Fujieda and Minamoto Hisanari, who later went on to write Wife and Wife. The story follows four fashion designers, to whom their boss affectionately refers as "Alices" (hence the title), and, as you would expect from this particular mangaka duo, is all about cuteness and gorgeous clothes.
The manga contains examples of following tropes:
- Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Fumi is tall, distant, and has long silky black hair (a fact that qualifies her for Queen Iono's sobame competition in Iono the Fanatics). However, despite generally behaving like a high-class Japanese lady, she has a Brutal Honesty streak and The Trickster tendencies that often unnerve the others.
- Bifauxnen: The tall, short-haired, and laid-back Yuuki is very popular with female customers, to the jealousy of her colleagues.
- Costume Porn: It appears the entire purpose of this manga was to give the mangaka an excuse to draw the leads in new pretty dresses every chapter (and sometimes changing into new ones mid-chapter).
- Elegant Gothic Lolita: Makino prefers to dress this way, and refuses to compromise even when doing a photo shoot in the blistering summer heat.
- Four-Girl Ensemble: Suika is the youngest and ditziest Alice, Yuuki is the tomboy, Fumi is tall and beautiful, and Makino is The Heart whose energy drives the atelier (in Yukino's absence).
- Four-Temperament Ensemble: Yuuki is Phlegmatic, Suika is Sanguine, Fumi is Melancholic, and Makino is Choleric.
- Like an Old Married Couple: Yukino and Makino have been friends since school and co-founded the Alice Quartet atelier together. Other girls remark how often they bicker with each other over trivialities, only to make up afterwards. They even take a chance to set them up on a surprise date.
- Ojou: Fumi, of course, comes from a rich Japanese family and lives in a huge traditional mansion with a carp pool and a shishi-odoshi.
- Tsundere: Makino likes Yukino very much, but gets extremely defensive about it whenever it is pointed out.
