Source:- Google.com.pk
Pink Corset Biography
It's 15 minutes before the doors will open at the very first Hello Kitty convention in downtown Los Angeles, and thousands of people are lined up to get in. Some have been there since three in the morning, and most are decked out in some sort of Hello Kitty gear, whether it be full-on cosplay or a favorite T-shirt.
Kitty Con, like the Hello Kitty brand itself, is a lot to take in. There's just so much. So much to look at, so much to do, so much to buy. You can have Hello Kitty nail art done by Sanrio's resident nail artist, Masako Kojima, while you eat a bow-adorned donut from the Hello Kitty Cafe truck and a complimentary Hello Kitty Yoplait yogurt in Friendship Berry. You can revive your phone at a glowing Hello Kitty charging station, take out cash at a Hello Kitty-wrapped ATM, and wash your hands with Hello Kitty soap in the bathrooms. (Rumor has it there was also Hello Kitty toilet paper in the stalls, but that was all used—or stashed in the plastic Hello Kitty backpacks that came with admission—by the end of the first morning.)
You can get free Hello Kitty tattoos, both temporary and very permanent ("Hug Life" in ornate script is a personal favorite), and you can spend gobs of money on merch like Hello Kitty Spam musubi kits and Beats by Dre headphones, all charged on a Hello Kitty credit card that you can sign up for at a kiosk some 20 feet away. You can get schooled in the art of Hello Kitty flower arranging, cookie decorating, and scrapbooking. You can play Hello Kitty Wheel of Fortune and take part in a Hello Kitty cosplay contest. You can Instagram yourself in any number of Hello Kitty-themed tableaux. You can even meet Hello Kitty herself, dressed up in one of her myriad outfits whipped up expressly for the occasion.
You can also meet Yuko Yamaguchi, the con's resident rock star. Fans scream her name in line as she walks by.
Yamaguchi has been Hello Kitty's designer—the character's third—since 1980. She's shown up to the convention, which coincides with Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary, in a navy Jane Marple dress with a white Peter Pan collar and studded boots. Her dyed orange hair is set in two buns, with a bow on the left one, just like the character she spends her days designing. The pièce de résistance is the red heart-shaped purse bedazzled with Hello Kitty's face and personalized with her name that hangs across her body.
Despite her playful appearance, Yamaguchi, known to fans as Kitty Mama, means business. She speaks slowly and assertively through Aya Seto, a project associate who acts as her translator, explaining how she ended up at the helm of Japanese character empire Sanrio.
Though her dream was to be an art director at an ad agency, she says it was impossible for a woman to land such a role in Japan some 35 years ago. On her job hunt, she attended presentations by a variety of companies, but the one at Sanrio stood out. Instead of a rote speech by an HR rep, Sanrio had founder and president Shintaro Tsuji talk to young applicants.
"He said he wanted to develop the business, and he wanted every employee to take leadership and responsibility as if they were the CEO, regardless of what role they played in the company," she explains. "After the presentation, I thought about how I wouldn't be limited there. I decided to join Sanrio so I could think and strategize as a designer about how to expand the brand."
That entrepreneurial spirit has pushed Hello Kitty forward and kept Yamaguchi on her enviable perch. Her role has expanded too—she's now the creative director of all of Sanrio and its 400-plus characters—but Hello Kitty remains paramount, as evidenced by the elaborate four-day convention.
"The most important thing about events like these are the fans," she says as an autograph line forms to the side. "The bigger the event, the more fans I can meet. By interacting with the fans, the next Hello Kitty design is born."
Sanrio was founded in 1960 by Shintaro Tsuji, affectionately known to employees and fans alike as Papa Tsuji. Originally the Yamanashi Silk Company, it introduced embellished rubber sandals in 1962. Tsuji learned, as he would time and time again, that a little bit of cuteness goes a long way: the decorative footwear was a hit. Thus began Sanrio's transformation into the full-fledged character company we know today.
Tsuji soon acquired the Japanese licensing rights to Snoopy, and by the early 1970s was interested in Sanrio creating its own characters that it could capitalize on. Market research showed that a dog would prove to be the most popular with consumers, but in an effort not to cannibalize its Snoopy business, Sanrio settled on a white cat.
Yuko Shimizu was Hello Kitty's first designer, and she named the character after Kitty, the kitten belonging to Alice's cat, Dinah, in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. The "Hello" was added to fulfill Tsuji's "social communication" mandate: Hello Kitty is about extending a hand in the name of friendship. "As Hello Kitty always says, 'You can never have too many friends!'" is something you hear again and again in Sanrio-land.
Hello Kitty was birthed in 1974, not quite girl, not quite cat, but rather gijinka—an anthropomorphization. It was anthropologist Christine Yano who caused the internet to explode this summer with her declaration to the Los Angeles Times that "Hello Kitty is not a cat" in promotion of the Japanese American National Museum exhibit she curated to coincide with Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary.
Let's clear something up, before we get in too deep: Technically, sure, Hello Kitty is not a cat—she's a character, not an actual animal. But she's a character in the form of a cat, the semantics of which were lost in translation and generated a collective freak-out. She's not a cat, but she's not not a cat, and that's something we're going to have to be okay with.
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
Pink Corset Corset Piercing tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Prom Dresses Tattoo Photos
No comments:
Post a Comment