Fans wait in line as Yuko, who’s surrounded by a phalanx of minders, draws Hello Kitty silhouettes and signs them with a flourish. If Hello Kitty is a religion, she is its pope. Later, I pass Yuko Yamaguchi, the third and current Hello Kitty illustrator. People used to roll their eyes and say: “Here comes Tommy with his Hello Kitty bag!’ I’d say: ‘Look, I’m not going to be 50 and walking around with my Hello Kitty bag.’ But last weekend was my 50th birthday and I went out for drinks in LA with my friends – and my Hello Kitty bag!”įeline groovy: official illustrator Yuko Yamaguchi. “When I was 21, I used to carry a Hello Kitty bag around. One of them is Tommy Moreno, a 50-year-old make-up artist with a handlebar moustache, pink trousers, a lime-green Hello Kitty sweater and a pink Hello Kitty-shaped bag. Although most of the attendees are women, Hello Kitty has no shortage of male admirers. One of the most popular events is a discussion chaired by Hello Kitty’s keenest male fans, entitled: “Guys Love Hello Kitty, Too”. (Hello Kitty’s obsessive focus on “cuteness” can be a thin veil for quite a lot of sexualisation – many of the costumes on display wouldn’t look out of place at a fetish club.)
The infamous Hello Kitty vibrator is actually a shoulder “massager”, I learn, although there seems no doubt about its real purpose. There’s no Hello Kitty chainsaw, but there are Hello Kitty contact lenses. “Getting a Hello Kitty tattoo might have been a novelty five years ago, but now it’s just a no-brainer if you’re a fan,” she adds.Įlsewhere, lectures explore the Hello Kitty universe and debunk certain myths.
#HELLO KITTY FOR FREE#
The queue for free inkings stretches around the building, but Walsworth sees her tattoo as a unique mark of her devotion, as well as displaying her membership of the tribe. “Hello Kitty is my boss and my ultimate muse in every sense of the word,” Walsworth says. For Walsworth, who’s getting a tattoo depicting Hello Kitty alongside a pair of scissors and the word “hello”, her job is clearly more than a way to pay the rent.
#HELLO KITTY PROFESSIONAL#
I catch up with her at the Hello Kitty tattoo parlour, where professional tattooists are on hand to give Hello Kitty fans free, permanent reminders of their visit. Sarah Walsworth, a visual-brand manager for Sanrio, is after something more permanent. ‘Getting a Hello Kitty tattoo was a novelty five years ago, but now it’s just a no-brainer if you are a fan’: two women show their devotion.
At the Major League Baseball stand, visitors can get temporary tattoos depicting Hello Kitty wearing the uniform of their favourite team. The Hello Kitty Beats by Dre headphones are selling like hotcakes. Visitors can get Hello Kitty nail art or Hello Kitty face-paint makeovers, and pick up a £75 Swarovski-studded, perfume-filled Hello Kitty ring. Dylan’s Candy Bar, the sweet-shop chain owned by Ralph Lauren’s daughter, has a stand piled high with limited-edition Hello Kitty chocolate. There are Hello Kitty Ty toys, building blocks, comics and pyjamas. In Hello Kitty Con’s Super Supermarket area, the most expensive items include a £250 Hello Kitty vintage telephone and a £1,132 Casio executive set containing a briefcase, camera and watch. One woman pauses for a second before blurting out “shopping”.Īh yes, shopping. When she asks the audience to sum up Hello Kitty in one word, “happy” features at least five times, as do “joy”, “friendship” and “smiles”. Leading the workshop is Katie Chin, a television chef. One of the first events I check out is a Spam musubi workshop (musubi is a popular dish in Hawaii, and comprises a slice of Spam on rice, wrapped with seaweed), where participants can make an edible Hello Kitty. You might expect her to be popular with young girls, but the convention proves that Hello Kitty fans are of every age and stripe, and with a limitless thirst for Hello Kitty-related activities. Hello Kitty attracts a level of eccentric devotion that, say, Peppa Pig cannot match. In August this year the Japanese government blasted her into space. She began life in 1974, on a purse, but quickly spread. She was born in London in November, has blood type A and is five apples tall. Despite her name and appearance (including whiskers), Hello Kitty is not a cat, but an English girl who never ages. As the totemic Japanese brand enters its fifth decade, however, the character herself remains ageless.
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