Who stands five apples tall, weighs three apples and is coming to a wardrobe near you? Why, Hello Kitty, the adorable, round-headed feline who turns fifty this year. And how better to ring in a milestone birthday than with the gift of merch? Kitty’s parent company, Sanrio, is embarking on an anniversary collaboration campaign the spoils of which won’t target children alone. The iconic cat and her pals are set to appear in everything from Funko Pops to Igloo coolers. The apparel world, too, is getting in on the whimsical fun with Uniqlo’s line of Seventies-inspired Hello Kitty t-shirts, dropping this week. But then, Ms. Kitty is something of a fashion darling – she’s appeared on Crocs, Converse and even Balenciaga handbags.
While there’s only one Hello Kitty, child’s play provides grown-up fashion lovers with plenty of enticing characters to mine, whether with a wink or a heartfelt smile. Just last year, Disney diehards celebrated the company’s hundredth anniversary and showed their love by plunking down for Ray-Bans, Charlotte Tilbury cosmetics and $3,000.00 Christian Louboutins, all flaunting visual tie-ins. Meanwhile, Barbie girls (and boys) could work a casual look with Vans and Gap, or go full runway in Mattel-inspired Balmain.
Yet fashion isn’t the only realm where the youthquake reigns supreme. Sometimes, it feels as though the lust for childlike wonder is everywhere. Barbie, 2023’s biggest movie, famously tallied up piles of money and accolades while launching an armada of media think pieces about the nature of womanhood. This erudition sprung from a toy whose play appeal typically wears out once the owner’s age crosses into double digits. On the music front, Taylor Swift, the world’s biggest current pop star, is known as much for her reflections on high school-style dating trauma as for her titanic songwriting prowess. One of her proteges – Olivia Rodrigo – is currently selling out arenas nationwide at ticket prices beyond the budget of even the most entrepreneurial teenaged babysitters. Not bad for a girl whose three-year-old breakout single tells the story of a romantic betrayal that transpires days after she gets her driver’s license. Nor is the book world immune. These days, upwards of fifty percent of readers of young adult books are, well, not so young. Fair enough, except many are going public with their desire for YA authors to age up their story lines to target them rather than the intended high school-aged audiences. Foyinsi Adegbonmire is an editor at Feiwel & Friends, a Macmillan children’s imprint. She told Publisher’s Weekly last year, “I do think adults should read teen books, as we benefit from insights into and reminders about what teenagers might be going through…The tension arises when adult readers begin to expect YA books to be written with them in mind.”
There’s nothing wrong with carrying one’s youthful affections into adulthood. (When Prada gets around to releasing a Nancy Drew collection, some of us will go bankrupt.) And there’s no law saying that these collaborations must be inherently childish. Case in point: Uniqlo’s capsule cuts Kitty’s cartoonish aesthetic with a slightly edgy retro vibe. Still, the near-constant supply of grown-up clothes based on kids' culture plays to the apparently widespread urge of adults to cling to the trappings of youth and even childhood. That urge can pose problems. Greta Gerwig packed Barbie with enough bona fides to justify its acclaim amongst the older set; it’s not every day that a smart, funny, weird, big-budget movie references filmmaking maestros Powell and Pressburger. But no matter how much one admires Gerwig’s brilliance, if you’re old enough to legally order a drink and you aren’t named Margot Robbie, perhaps dressing like Barbie isn’t for you. Similarly, there’s a difference between unwinding from a tough day by losing oneself in a beloved classic House of Mouse movie and stepping out of Cinderella’s coach to get married at Disney World.
To be fair, as a concept, growing up stinks. There are bills to pay and taxes to file and crippling neck pain if you sleep on your left side instead of your right. There is an undeniable allure to remaining forever young – just ask any fan of Botox and hair dye. But the path towards perpetual arrested development is a dangerous road to walk, and eternal youth isn’t all it's cracked up to be. So, for the Disney adults and the Sanrio-obsessed, enjoy your passions, but perhaps also heed these cautionary tales.
There’s no more famous a poster boy for the anti-maturity movement than J.M. Barrie’s Neverland-dwelling, pirate-fighting, green tights-wearing airborne scamp, Peter Pan. “All children, except for one, grow up,” writes Barrie in Peter and Wendy, the 1911 novelization of the author’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. With a resume that includes breaking and entering and abduction, Peter has to be literature’s most lovable recidivist felon. Wendy Darling and her siblings are enraptured by the magical interloper who whisks them off to a land unfettered by the shackles of adult influence. At first blush, Peter’s life seems aspirational – devoid of responsibilities and full of mermaids and fairies and a cadre of adoring adolescent pals. Peter, too, is an enticing figure; he’s brash, bold and fiercely independent. No wonder Wendy and Tinkerbell vie for his affections.
A closer look, however, reveals something darker. Putting aside his penchant for kidnapping, Peter’s fanatical devotion to not growing up leads to some abhorrent behavior. He holds cultish sway over the Lost Boys, whose ranks he “thins out” when “they seem to be growing up.” Barrie does not elaborate on what this thinning out entails, but given Peter’s violent rejection of aging, one assumes it’s nothing good. Indeed, his resentment of adults borders on the murderous. When Wendy informs him that she wants to return home to her surely distraught mother, an agitated Peter speeds up his breathing, “because there is a saying in Neverland that every time you breathe, a grown-up dies.” Though attempting to murder her mother by respiration is his worst sin against Wendy, it’s far from his only transgression. For much of the novel, Peter toys with her emotions, treating her as a friend one moment and a servant the next. Perhaps Wendy should have caught wise from the jump when the opportunity to “darn [the Lost Boys’] clothes and make pockets for us” is pitched as a selling point for absconding to Neverland. Is there something of Peter in the many adults who gleefully brave the heat, crowd and lines at the Happiest Place on Earth sans the company of minor children? Perhaps not in all of them, but maintaining such enthusiasm for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride into middle age is a red flag.
Peter is far from the only literary character seduced by the promise of eternal youth. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde presents a dastardly libertine par excellence, a vain, attractive young man. Enraptured by Dorian’s beauty, artist Basil Hallward paints a portrait so lovely that it awes even its subject. Dorian immediately seizes upon the sad reality that he will age while this perfect image remains forever unblemished. “If only it were the other way,” he laments, “if it was I who was to be always young and the picture that was to grow old…I would give my soul for that!” Give his soul he does. Dorian’s good looks remain frozen in amber while the portrait bears the consequences of his life of hedonism. When he cravenly rejects Sibyl Vane, he is delighted to find that the portrait now displays “a touch of cruelty at the mouth.” Of course, since this snub results in Sibyl’s suicide, perhaps “touch of cruelty” is a bit of artistic license.
Reeling from Sibyl’s death and inspired by a “poisonous French novel,” Dorian devotes himself to the pursuit of sensuality and pleasure. While there’s nothing wrong with a little aesthetic hedonism, Dorian’s progresses wantonly. Ruminations on the allure of Henry VIII’s “jacket of raised gold” and Richard II’s ruby-encrusted coat devolve into murder. In a fit of shame and rage, he stabs Basil, whose creative work had set him on this path. All the while, the portrait grows older and more hideous. Plagued by guilt and fear of prosecution, Dorian resolves to destroy the only evidence of his murderous actions – the painting. Alas, things don’t quite go as planned. At novel’s end, the “splendid portrait” is intact, in its original form, while its subject lies dead in his “evening dress…withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage.”
Peter Pan and Dorian Gray make conscious decisions, however questionable, to eschew the trappings of adulthood, whether physical or moral. But what of those who have agelessness thrust upon them? In Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, five-year-old Claudia finds herself in just such an unpleasant predicament after a fateful encounter with Louis de Ponte du Lac. Having recently been turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt, a distraught Louis comes upon the orphaned, plague-stricken girl and, mad with hunger, accidentally gives her his “immortal kiss.” Even vampires have their taboos, and as it happens, turning children is one of them, for reasons that will become all too clear. Louis and Lestat take Claudia in as something of a demonic ward. Sure, there were likely worse fates that could befall a parentless, 18th-century waif than becoming the coddled lovechild of too fabulously wealthy creatures of the night. At first, it’s a rosy existence for Claudia despite the reliance on blood-drinking and murder. Louis and Lestat dote on her, enlisting “an endless train of dressmakers, shoemakers and tailors…to outfit [her] in the best of children’s fashions.” But after a few decades, the spoiled perpetual girl longs for perpetual womanhood. Lestat and Louis may have saved her from the plague, but they’ve doomed her to eternity as “a magnificent doll.” Resentment curdles into rage, and Claudia grows increasingly erratic, channeling her most violent fury toward Lestat. Ultimately, her bitterness leads to her demise, but at least she’s finally free of the frilly frocks.
No one should be faulted for indulging in a little nostalgic kitsch. These much-beloved characters – the princesses, the mermaids, the five-apple-high kitties – are beloved for a reason, and even the most sophisticated of wardrobes (or bookshelves, or movie libraries) benefits greatly from a dash of innocent fun. The road to infantilism is not paved with adult Hello Kitty t-shirts. It’s paved with adult Hello Kitty t-shirts at the expense of everything else. Cut that Disney-movie marathon with a side of David Cronenberg. Throw one or two Fleetwood Mac songs onto your Olivia Rodrigo playlist. And when getting your Sanrio fix at Uniqlo, make sure to at least peruse the latest JW Anderson drop – unfettered and economical, with eternal big-girl chic.
I guess it’s time to throw away my Howdy Doody cookie jar.