![]() Only last month, she travelled to Las Vegas to marry the other love of her life – in a Hello Kitty dress and shoes, naturally – and dropped close to £300 in the city’s Hello Kitty Cafe.Īs a self-identified “purist”, she estimates her collection is around 99% authentic Sanrio merchandise, although she strongly prefers the more niche items, “anything that’s not the average lunch bag or pen”. She travelled two hours to pick it up but has spent far larger sums and travelled much further to add to her collection, including two trips to Japan, as she tends to shop “splurge by splurge”. One of Amy’s oldest items is a suitcase from this transitional period with “I’m Kitty” written on it, which is so historically significant a London museum has expressed interest in borrowing it for anįunnily enough, it was also one of her cheaper purchases, costing her just £5 on Facebook marketplace from a woman in the “deepest, darkest depths of south-east London”. Hello Kitty was created in 1974 for the Japanese company Sanrio and, though she is now the tourist ambassador for Japan, was at first simply a nameless cat, receiving her famous moniker a few years later. ![]() ![]() As the child of two antiques dealers, she “grew up in a house that looked like the Adams Family home, full of dead stuff” and feels her parents “gave a real appreciation for the past and history” that arguably sparked her interest in collecting. “My mum, if she liked something, would often buy two or three of it and I kind of picked that habit up,” Amy said. While she is sheepish about speculating on the total she has spent over the last 27 years, saying it would make her “depressed”, it must be in the thousands, especially given her habit of buying two of the items she likes: “one for the collection and one to use”. “At the time, I collected Miffy but she was much cuter.”Īmy’s collection of Hello Kitty merchandise fills her very large bedroom in a Walthamstow guardianship wall-to-wall, ranging from tiny badges and buttons to a stuffed toy that is easily the size of a small person. “I thought she was a total babe,” she said, recalling the little stuffed toy that started her lifelong passion. One of the most fateful meetings of Amy Allen’s life so far took place at a car boot sale when she was eleven, where the now 38-year-old first crossed paths with Hello Kitty. Amy Allen tells Victoria Munro how her unusual obsession began Amy Allen at home with her collection
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