Hello Kitty is not a cat, she was born in the suburbs in London and her hobbies include baking cookies and making new friends. Earlier this year, when entertainment company Sanrio reiterated that their beloved cartoon character with whiskers and pointy ears was a little girl, it still came as a surprise to some. Sanrio deals in all things kawaii or “cute” and with the totemic Japanese brand completing five decades, perhaps they wanted to leave no room for confusion. At Péro’s Spring Summer ’25 show at Lakme Fashion Week on Wednesday night, a Hello Kitty mascot walked around in Péro, while a big soft toy sat in the audience. There were many reminders of the global marketing phenomenon that has worked with luxury brands like Balenciaga in the past and now Casio, Crocs and Adidas. Yet for most of the attendees, the night was also a celebration of founder and designer Aneeth Arora’s 15-year-journey and the craft and rigorous processes that have taken Péro to 35 countries and approximately 300 shops.
Most fashion journalists refer to Aneeth as reclusive or camera shy. She prefers not to take a runway bow, would rather travel to the interiors of India than vacation abroad (many of her customers are from Japan but she has never been), doesn’t believe in fashion sketches (“too limiting”) and is yet to launch her own retail store.
At the show, several said they couldn’t spot her. “Hello Kitty and Péro have many similarities. The character doesn’t have a mouth…we too let our work speak for itself,” she had observed ahead of the show. Said work lived up to the adulation that night. In their press note, Péro terms it “‘Cottagecore Kawaii’, a mix of cottagecore and ‘grandma core’ that borrows from delicate laces, embroidery and prints seen in bed linen in Calcutta and Europe.” Japanese floral print and nautical sailor stripes were matched with beadwork, origami hearts, tassels and hand crochet.
“I have been a fan of Pero since attending their exhibition at Amethyst more than a decade ago. I love her use of colour, attention to detail and most of all the storytelling. One of my favourite collections was a collaboration with Princess Pea, from which I have a woollen jacket as well as a miniature Princess Pea doll that has a miniature Pero dress on her! Aside from the craftsmanship, I am happy to wear garments that I know have been made with ethical production processes”Justine DePenningInterior designer
“As a student in textile design, I told myself I would make my own fabric if I ever start a label,” she has recalled often. ‘Hello Péro’ doesn’t disappoint, with Chanderi from Madhya Pradesh, ‘Mashru’ from Gujarat, gabardine and taffeta silks from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The styling is fresh and the silhouettes are both feminine and unisex. “I am notorious for doing oversize and anti-fit,” she explained. “Also embroidery and feminine pieces and masculine broad-shouldered jackets. But everything is more fluid these days. Unisex gives us a lot of freedom and playfulness, while earlier our menswear was serious and restricted to men’s stores.”
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Aneeth Arora
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Were you a Hello Kitty fan before this collab?
I had lunch boxes with Hello Kitty on them back in school but it was only during the lockdown when I was watching the 2017 Netflix documentary, The Toys That Made Us, that I grew to understand the journey of Hello Kitty. I was surprised that I resonated with its philosophy and thought they would be good to collaborate with someday. Cut to 2024, their 50th anniversary, and they approached Péro [as part of their expansion plans for India].
But how did this come about?
Journalist Supriya Dravid who has written about me, from my first collection onwards, knew someone in the Sanrio office. When they mentioned the idea of a collaboration, she recommended Péro.
“All sorts of people wear Pero, not just the creative community, though the latter go for her wacky jackets. She appeals to people who like the frills as well as those who like elegant, understated clothes with fine detailing, like a simple check or stripe. What’s extraordinary is that she has been able to, with her layering, straddle both those worlds. That’s her success. Westerners may not want to go for the frilly pieces but love the French knotting and the faggoting. Her references are very clever, unusual when you see it for the first time. She stays true with what she started with, continues to draw upon that. And she has built up this archive that has become a world unto itself.”Kiran RaoAmethyst
You have often said that the universe makes things happen for Péro…
Yes, from the first season that we launched. I was one of the GenNext designers and of seven of us, by fluke, two designers were featured in Vogue Italia. My distributor Adele Gandola, then a housewife in Milan, happened to open that very page and her mind was set with just one picture of Péro. She visited us, and since we were ready with our garments, she took them back with her and to the relevant shops in Europe. I had never travelled overseas back then. Thanks to her, we had export orders in the first season, and were in over 50 shops overseas. That is unusual for any Indian fashion brand.
Everything else that happened after felt like it happened organically: The Young Entrepreneur Award from The British Council, the Vogue Fashion Fund…any money was good money for the business. It gave me a lot of exposure and we kept building our business.
While Hello Kitty has had several collaborations, it shares some traits with Péro…
Take the bow on Hello Kitty, it signifies connecting people. The brand is about love and kindness, which is our philosophy too. The character doesn’t have a mouth…we too let our work speak for itself. And the “small gift, big smile” tagline Sanrio used sometime back, for our customers it is the little something they discover in our garments, be it a little heart or a customised button. With this SS 25 collection, we are portraying Hello Kitty’s world through the eyes of Péro. We play on nostalgia with all our shows and collections. Like kids, we don’t care too much about what people think or say.
“I had dreamed of a jacket in which I could carry my nine Museum Bhavan books, that I could whip out and open into an accordion, turning me into the museum itself. Over months of sampling and making variations, Aneeth and I found the perfect solution. I wore this jacket to the show. I also display it in my exhibitions. When I first saw Aneeth’s work I was blown away by the detailing and to how the clothes ‘felt’ on the wearers body rather than how they ‘looked’.
”Dayanita SinghPhotographer
Were there challenges while working on this collab?
We work two years in advance as a brand. But when Hello Kitty came to us eight months ago, our SS 25 colour palette was fortunately the same as their world: blue, red, pink and white. The collection has animal motifs, strawberries, cherries, all in mixed media and embroideries. We tried woven textiles such as jamdhani and brocade, and enjoyed the process but it resulted in a very distorted version of Hello Kitty. There is a lot of protocol to maintain the proportion and likeness of the character, which we must respect, especially as it is 50 years old! Since we had better control over embroidery, we rendered Hello Kitty through embroidery and prints instead.
The Hello Kitty theme extends across shirts, dresses, skirts, and jackets. There are both your classics and experimental styles.
I cannot forget the first Péro clients who came all the way to my DDA flat [at Siddhartha Extension in New Delhi] 15 years ago. It was also my workshop. Photographer Dayanita Singh, writer and activist Arundhati Roy, filmmakers Mira Nair and Kiran Rao, British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor…they all discovered us there and believed in what we were doing. I wanted to create timeless styles and they helped me hold on to that belief and philosophy. So we still do our classics line alongside our experimental line, with new fabrics of course.
The jacket that was upcycled
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The silent collab
“We believe in the ‘mended with love’ concept. Longtime customers give those first pieces to me and I mend them. Sometimes they want a bit of newness to an outfit they have worn so much, so I add a flower or a button. There was a denim jacket that travelled with me around the world, and wherever I found a pin or button or a fabric I liked I would add it. Dayanita saw this and asked if I could help her with one of her jackets. I did what I could but didn’t remove that brand’s label, as I had not made the piece. I added the ‘Upcycled by Péro’ label instead and started calling it a silent collaboration.”
Aneeth Arora
Published – October 10, 2024 06:11 pm IST