Hello Kitty

Yes, Even Middle-Aged Women Yield To Cute

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imageCathy Horyn at the Chanel autumn/winter 2016 show holding Hector Browne, a canine handbag. Photo: The Cut

Kawaii, in all shapes and sizes, is well and alive. And Kawaii knows no age limit. Two sixty-something women were seen at the Shu Uemura counter in Robinsons this afternoon, cooing with delight when they spotted a pair of white Bearbricks holding up the make-up brand’s latest update of its popular eye-liner caligraph:ink. With very little persuasion from the salesgirl, both bought two pens, one of the ladies visibly and audibly delighted that she will soon be able to enhance her already Cleopatra-esque eyes.

While we have no doubt the women had purchased a good and useful product, we’re also quite certain that the two plastic anthropomorphic figurines hastened the sale. Cuteness, as modern marketers know, is catalyst to confirming a transaction, from make-up to fashion to digital gadgets (that Nekohako power bank by Sanyo in the shape of a cat!). What’s certain, too, is that sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice adorability—so plainly exemplified by the Powerpuff Girls—is not circumscribed by age.

The recent multi-social platform posts and shares of Cathy Horyn holding a “wiener-dog” under her arm at the Chanel show proved that even a mature “fashion deity” (as Racked called her) cannot resist the charms of the cute. The animal of so many people’s amusement turned out to be a named beast-bag called Hector, first seen in the autumn/winter 2016 show of Thom Browne in New York two months ago. Ms Horyn wrote in The Cut: “Thom owns the real Hector, on whom a litter of wiener-dog bags (is that nice to say?) was modeled.” Nice to say? Boggling. Was she referring to a certain incident in which she called an American designer a “hot dog” and was, in return, referred to as “a stale 3-day old hamburger”?

Dandy dachshund aside, did Hector’s disarming adorability make Ms Horyn less threatening, less feared, less a deity. The effect of cuteness by her side has allowed the pet-purse’s owner to take pleasure in a “modest success during Paris Fashion Week as a street-style star”. Yet, there were times when onlookers thought “Hector was the product of taxidermy rather than fashion”. Is that some kind of ageist reaction there? And are there those who can’t see an older person carrying something that cute as hold-all? Past five decades of life and you should have instead a real companion like Karl Lagerfeld’s Choupette?

Loewe AW 2016 cat necklaceLoewe’s leather necklace with perspex resin cat pendant. Photo: vogue.com

Kawaii accessories are so associated with school girls that on older women, the latter’s sartorial judgment could be called into question. While it is not reported (nor witnessed) that those sneakers with teddy bear tongues by Adidas and Jeremy Scott have scored big with anyone about to receive their first CPF cheque, it is blinkered to consider cuteness the prerogative of the young. If shortness and sheerness of dress are no longer equated to mid-life, fashion items with mammalian likeness could well be on the right side of 50 (or insert your preferred decade). Age, as we’re increasingly accustomed to, is no barrier to entry.

Animals have always lent themselves to the delineation of cuteness. Hello Kitty! And that cat necklace that Jonathan Anderson introduced at the Loewe autumn/winter show just two weeks ago. Surely women of a certain age would wear it if they cannot resist its charm. And why should they? Resistance is futile when kawaii has become a global culture. So successful has the Japanese been with exporting their consumable cuteness that, according to Japan Times, search data from early this year is suggesting that “the image of Japan as the land of Hello Kitty upstaged its perception as a country full of swaggering samurai and mincing geisha in the Western mind”.

Chat apps such as Line perpetuate the necessity of cuteness (bear and bunny as a dating couple!) in not only our everyday online conversations, but also our everyday activities, even those as normally unmentionable as going to the toilet to facilitate bowel movement. How do you explain the need for a poo emoji—21 variants, last count? The irony of it all is that as one gets older, there’s less need for euphemistically enhanced images to replace the utterance of natural motions. Who gives a shit!

Loewe Cat Head Necklace, SGD1,150, is available for pre-order at loewe.com

Pearl Ardour

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Xiong Dailin @ MikimotoChinese model-turn-actress Xiong Dailin, garlanded with pearls worth S$355,000, at the launch of Mikimoto X Hello Kitty

You wake up one day and the world’s most famous cat isn’t a cat anymore. Do you still love the non-feline? Loving an indeterminate can be hard. That’s why the world was shocked by the LA Times report just last month that the cat is a British girl (with an Americanism for a name!). A representative for its creator would later attempt to clarify: “We never said she was a human.” But they have never said she wasn’t! Should we even assume she’s a she? And then we learned that she’s a “personification of a cat”! A mere personification. How lovable is that?

Suffering from an identity crisis or not, truth is, Hello Kitty will not be less loved. Many brands know that; the high-end ones too. Hence the unrelenting fixation with putting the mouthless cat onto countless products, from biscuits to bracelets. Hello Kitty sells. McDonald’s knows it, so does Mikimoto. That’s why, as part of the first anniversary of their store in The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, they introduced the Mikimoto X Hello Kitty collection that was launched in Japan early this year. Pop culture and haute joaillerie may not make the most synergistic pairing, but these days, to get your brand out there to those populating Twitter-sphere and its surrounding universe, you have to hit at what’s relevant. And what is still relevant, for so many customers of today, is Hello Kitty, never mind the cat hasn’t said a word since its birth in 1974.

Hello Kitty & Hello KittyHello Kitty’s distinctive face and her always present bow are outlined and fashioned into a S$1,140 silver bangle with an akoya pearl embedded in the centre of the bow

The absence of Hello Kitty’s mouth speaks louder about its desire to talk than its lack of a voice. If a name can be taken literally, surely Hello—used primarily to express greeting—is utterance even only in written form. Hello usually denotes friendliness (a warm hello is common, not a cold one), and is used to attract attention (a call out). Hello Kitty projects a friendly image and, attached to different products, calls for attention, even more so in her different guises. The fiasco surrounding the mad rush for McDonald’s release of “Singing Bone” Kitty in June, part of the Fairy Tale series the restaurant was selling to make fast food disturbingly extra appealing, attests to the cat’s ability for generating irrational interest in itself.

Hello Kitty isn’t the pinnacle of design, yet it has the power to attract and fascinate. The missing mouth has been attributed to a minimalist design option, but the products associated with it are rarely themselves minimalist. Yet, in its simplest form, Hello Kitty is an unfussy delineation of a “personification”, as uncomplicated as it is expressionless, like a stick drawing. There are other cuter creatures in the Japanese pantheon of kawaii immortals, but Hello Kitty sits at the very apex, unsmiling, reportedly netting USD7 billion a year, not bad for a 40-year-old.

Mikimoto X Hello Kitty neck wearClockwise from left: 18k white gold necklace of akoya pearls, rubies, white diamonds, yellow diamonds, pink sapphires, and onyx, S$355,000; 18k white gold choker of akoya pearls, rubies, white diamonds, yellow diamonds, and onyx, S$202,000; 18k white gold pendant with diamonds and south sea pearl, S$12,600

As blank as Hello Kitty’s countenance is the pearl, a gem born of molluscs. Unlike a diamond, which is mostly sold faceted to articulate its brilliance and worth, the pearl is usually left uncut so as not to spoil its natural sheen. Pearl and the maybe cat would, therefore, seem to go well together. The cute factor of the beribboned one, however, is at odds with pearl’s undiminished reputation as ladylike. What ties the two together is the conservatism that they represent: both never associated with the wild, the crazy, or the immoral. The two are pearls of the Orient! This is augmented by Mikomoto’s designs—hyper-femininity spread across very traditional products categories for hair, ear, neck, and wrist. These are points often considered sensual, and should ideally be prettified.

The heydays of pearls were in the Twenties and the Fifties, and their history meandered differently, thanks firstly to Gabrielle Chanel. Indeed Coco should be credited for treating pearls less preciously than they were regarded. In the 1920s, she would team her rope of natural pearls—gifted to her by a Russian exile, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov (one of the few Romanovs to not have been slain by the Bolsheviks), whose pearls were part of what little heirloom he had left—with strands of costume jewellery, and wear them with casual clothes. This seemingly flippant mix would become her trademark, and pearls (and more pearls, worn not neatly) had the company of fun until the 1950s.

Mikimoto X Hello Kitty hair clipThe only item in the collection that can be considered cute just as Hello Kitty is thought to be adorable is this S$147,000 hair clip of 18k white gold, akoya pearls, rubies, diamonds, yellow diamonds, and onyx

In the decade that saw the rise of rock & roll, fashion was shaped by Christian Dior’s New Look silhouette that first emerged in 1947. It continued to influence women’s dress-shape choices throughout much of the Fifties. Pearls, worn shorter and closer to the neck than Coco Chanel did in the Twenties, gained popularity as they went extremely well with the stiffly neat and ladylike aesthetic of those years. By the time Audrey Hepburn, playing a call girl called Holly Golightly, wore that five-strand pearl necklace over that Givenchy dress in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, pearls had sealed their destiny as the gem to authenticate a woman’s decorous, genteel, and elegant repute. It would also come to be connected with sweater sets and what one wore to church or in the White House.

Its association with feminine prim and proper has never really waned. It wasn’t until John Galliano’s spring 2007 couture show for Christian Dior that pearls had a chance at fashionable stylishness. Mr Galliano’s collection—inspired, as he said, “by Pinkerton’s affair with Cio-Cio San”—wasn’t heavy on pearls, but in a wedding dress-like gown at the end of the show, model Jacquetta Wheeler had on her neck a 20-strand pearl creation that ran the gamut of pearl necklace lengths, from collar to matinee, something the English Princess, Mary of Teck, might have worn in the early 1900s before being Queen Consort to King George V. Mr Galliano’s Madam Butterfly reference and his use of pearls were noteworthy, as Japan was and still is very much the centre for cultured or akoya pearls.

Mikimoto X Hello KittyThe communication design of  Mikimoto X Hello Kitty collection that was launched last Wednesday

And no Japanese name is more synonymous with cultured pearls than Mikimoto. Although, in China, cultured pearls were produced as early as 400 AD, it’s the Japanese who perfected the production (there’s even a Mikomoto Pearl Island—the birthplace of what the company calls “cultured pearls aquaculture”) and perpetuated pearls and their lustre. Japanese pearls have both history and romance to heighten their allure, including stories of those brave ama divers—dubbed “pearl diving mermaids of Japan”, so beautifully immortalised by photographer Iwase Yoshiyuki in his documentation of the fading traditions of coastal Japan.

Back at the anniversary celebration at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands, 33-year-old star Xiong Dailin, more noted for being Aaron Kwok’s (ex-) girlfriend than an actress of note, wore the most dramatic piece from the Mikimoto X Hello Kitty collection—a 12-strand necklace with just a hint of Hello Kitty’s visage on the right, discernible by the ruby ribbon, diamond nose, and onyx eyes (no idea why the whiskers were omitted). Predictably, Ms Xiong was conservatively attired, pairing the jewellery with a black dress that has sleeves of lace, relegating, even if inadvertently, pearls back to their disposition of the past. That left much of the charming to Hello Kitty. You see, Hello Kitty will enthral, even if she is no pearl of wisdom.

Mikimoto X Hello Kitty collection is available at the Mikimoto boutique, level 1, The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands