Goodbye Kitty
Born in 1974 in Japan, Hello Kitty has become an international phenomenon over the years. Especially for about ten years, roughly from 2005 to 2015, she was omnipresent everywhere: depicted on the most commonly used products as well as on super-luxury ones. A true pop icon. And like any self-respecting icon, there were people who madly loved her (especially the younger girls) and people who deeply hated her (a minority, but still many all over the world).
Raffaele Iannello, to bring together both types of public (i.e. those who loved it and those who hated it) in 2012 presented the prototype of the Goodbye Kitty knife set. The idea was that this product could finally please everyone. To those who loved her and didn’t want to miss a new version of their favorite character and to those who hated her and who would finally satisfy their desire to see her pierced by knives.
The first piece of the character’s name in this interpretation is no longer “Hello” but has ironically become “Goodbye”. Goodbye Kitty is practically the Hello Kitty version of the famous Voodoo / The Ex set created by the same designer. The famous kitten is depicted in the same position (i.e. on tiptoe, with arms forward and head stretched back) as the stylized little man and both are placed on the same circular base which acts as a support for the entire set of knives.
Although by now it had been engineered, tested with various prototypes and ready for mass production, the product never went into production because the designer’s licensees, after years of negotiations that now seemed to have concluded positively, never reached a definitive agreement with Sanrio on Hello Kitty trademark use rights. So the Goodbye Kitty prototype presented at the exhibition is to be considered to all intents and purposes a unique piece, a work of art created by the designer for himself and not intended for sale.
If it had been mass-produced, as already done with its Voodoo / The Ex counterpart, probably other variants would have been launched in addition to the knife set, such as the pen set and the aperitif set.
