Buying In - (Page 20) 20 rob walker straightforward enough. For starters, Hello Kitty is adorable. And celebrities i Japan, and later in the United States, have embraced the icon in one media-saturated setting or another, presumably inspiring some copycat consumption. But there must be more to it than that. While Sanrio has made certain “biographical” information about her known, if you feel like tracking it down (she lives in London, she has a sister who bakes cookies, and so on), she is not, like Snoopy or Mickey Mouse, a character who has engaged in memorable adventures or has a developed a personality of any kind. This is intentional. “We work very hard to avoid things that would define the character,” a Sanrio executive has explained. Similarly, the company also does very little advertising on behalf of this, its most profitable emblem. Nor can the mouthless cat be said to “stand for” some social or cultural idea—like the Polo emblem’s supposed connotation of upper-class leisure or the Ecko rhino’s (possibly debatable) links to urban culture. Hello Kitty stands for nothing. Or, perhaps, for anything. Yuko Shimizu has said that she was never thinking about anything other than making an image that would appeal to little girls. “The simplicity is what made people understand Hello Kitty,” she concluded. A perceptive study of the Hello Kitty phenomenon by Tokyo-based cultural scholar Brian J. McVeigh suggests an interesting theory that is implied by his paper’s title: “How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool and Camp.” While he notes factors like “accessibility” and consistency, the most compelling factor he isolates is “projectability.” Hello Kitty’s blank, “cryptic” simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”—and let’s be frank: meaningless—symbol comes
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