Feeding the Kitty
New York
Everywhere you look in a cluttered niche of the store you see Hello Kitty, the winsome white cat with the button nose and blank stare, peering up at you from T-shirts, notepads and even an electric toothbrush.
This must be the little girls’ aisle in Zany Brainy or Toys R Us, right?
Wrong.
This is the Lair boutique at Henri Bendel, the 5th Avenue specialty store where Prada-clad big girls, if you can call size 2 twigs big girls, flock for their fix of Hello Kitty tchotchkes.
Alas, the $90 retractable dog leashes and the $600 backpacks have sold out, but a $175 tennis bag and $50 spa slippers are still available to fashionistas who like to accessorize their wardrobes with a wink and a grin.
“I am so allergic to pretentiousness in fashion, and I think everyone else is too,” said Tiffany Dubin, the socialite and former director of Sotheby’s fashion department who last year founded Lair, a chic little den that sells funky collectibles, vintage jewelry and an exclusive “couture” range of Hello Kitty accessories, like a $40 belt with an enamel buckle of you-know-who. “Now, having a sense of fun is where it’s at, like wearing your Marc Jacobs coat with a plastic Hello Kitty purse.”
Sometimes, to relieve the tedium of a dull dinner party, Dubin has been known to flash the pink lights surrounding the face of her Hello Kitty watch. The insouciant feline has come a long way since the Tokyo-based Sanrio Co. introduced the character in 1974 (1976 in the United States) as a cute adornment for notepads, coin purses and other accessories for the pig-tailed set.
She set off a craze in Japan, where little girls, their teenage sisters and mothers amassed such treasures as Hello Kitty teacups, skateboards, kimonos, lip gloss, cat food and, briefly, vibrators (which were deemed inappropriate and pulled off the market).
Although American fans aren’t as obsessed -- we do not yet have Hello Kitty cafes serving kitty-shaped waffles as they do in Hong Kong and Tokyo -- many nevertheless remain loyal from kindergarten to college to corporate suite. They still coo over Hello Kitty accessories -- “cute! cute!” is the mantra of Kittyphiles -- and display an inordinate fondness for pastel pink and blue, the cat’s preferred colors. Maybe it’s nostalgia or a need to channel their inner cutie-pie or just a passion for kitschy fashion. Whatever the reason, legions of women, sporting $200 haircuts and La Perla lingerie, have lost their hearts to Hello Kitty.
“A trip to a Sanrio store by grown women is not an uncommon thing,” said Mariah O’Brien, a 30-year-old actress who lives in Hollywood with her husband and daughter, Lucia, 5, and traces her Hello Kitty roots back to fifth grade. “If I go to buy my daughter something, it’s impossible to get out of the store without buying something for myself.”
O’Brien estimated that she owns about 30 Hello Kitty items, including a CD player, a toaster (which imprints a kitty face on the bread), clothes, nail polish and a brush coveted by her daughter. Last year, O’Brien gave her best friend a Hello Kitty beaded evening bag for Christmas.
“Wearing Hello Kitty is like wearing a designer logo, but cooler,” said O’Brien, who favors Miu Miu and Prada and tucks a Hello Kitty address book into her Balenciaga bag. “It says the person is hip, fun and doesn’t take fashion too seriously. For sure, there is a cool factor to Hello Kitty.”
Which may be why several in the red carpet brigade strut around with all sorts of Hello Kitty paraphernalia. Mariah Carey totes a boom box, Tyra Banks carries a sequined evening bag, Selma Blair sports a hat and mittens, Drew Barrymore wears a watch and Gwen Stefani uses a cell phone case. Christina Aguilera went so far as to proclaim her passion for Hello Kitty gum to Jay Leno.
Singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb is a collector too. “Hello Kitty brings a sense of fun to the mundane things in life, like putting on a scarf or making coffee,” said Loeb, whose trove includes leg warmers, a stereo, rice cooker, waffle maker, pajamas and a microphone cover given to her by a Japanese fan. In tongue-in-cheek homage, Loeb’s latest CD is called “Hello Lisa,” and the cover features the singer wearing Hello Kitty’s signature hair bow and the cat wearing Loeb’s trademark glasses.
Why are so many women besotted?
“The first thing is that Hello Kitty is really adorable and cute, what the Japanese call kawaii, and that appeals to a lot of women on a direct level,” said fashion historian Valerie Steele, acting director of the museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Then, on another level, there is this ironic element of a grown-up wearing a kid’s cartoon character. You can use it to express parts of your personality, including your inner child. A businesswoman who takes out a Hello Kitty pen at a meeting shows she is not just another corporate suit but an individual. Hello Kitty represents the best part of fashion, the freedom part.”
Tarina Tarantino, 32, a jewelry and accessories designer who lives in the Hollywood Hills and has a collection of more than 100 Hello Kitty items, agreed. “A woman who wears Hello Kitty is not afraid of what people think,” said Tarantino, whose hair is hot pink and whose taste in clothes runs to the “eclectic, colorful and funky.”
“You see these women carrying their Prada bags with a Hello Kitty key chain hanging from them. I love that.” The designer, whose colorful crystal and Lucite jewelry has been worn by Claire Danes, Cameron Diaz and Heather Graham, is currently negotiating with Sanrio to do a collection of accessories and jewelry featuring a pink-haired Hello Kitty.
Every month, Sanrio unleashes a slew of new Hello Kitty merchandise -- a pink microwave oven and a pink phone with angel wings are holiday offerings -- which is sold in its stores from Des Moines to Dubai. Production is limited and items are kept on the shelves for a brief period, thus ensuring that Sanrio’s star cat becomes a hot collectible. (Two years ago, Kitty buffs in Singapore rioted at McDonald’s outlets when the chain ran out of little plastic Hello Kittys clad in wedding gowns on the first day of a monthlong promo.)
The company, with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion, markets children’s products featuring dozens of other characters, including Badtz Maru, a playful penguin; Pinki Lili, a teddy bear; Pochacco, a frisky puppy, and My Melody, a little bunny. Although the other characters share the shelves with Hello Kitty in various outlets, including Target, FAO Schwarz and the Learning Express, none comes close to matching the appeal of the superstar feline.
“It’s amazing the emotional attachment women have for Hello Kitty,” said Bill Hensley, the marketing director of Sanrio Inc., the company’s U.S. subsidiary. “Twenty-year-olds write to us and use words like ‘addiction,’ which is pretty powerful. What they tell us is that they find Hello Kitty irresistible because she’s so cute.”
Don’t snicker. At a time when the nightly news and morning headlines bring a barrage of bad tidings, there is something delightful about waking up to waffles shaped like a big kitten face.
What can be the harm in a little whimsy, a lot of pink and an adorable cat to coax a grin?
“I once had a pair of Hello Kitty rain boots and whenever I wore them on the subway, women would come rushing up to me and say, ‘Wherever did you get those wonderful boots?’ ” recalled Steele. “They made people happy just to look at them. Now, especially, people are drawn to fashion that gives you a happy feeling. And Hello Kitty makes you smile.”
