hellow kitty t-Shirt

Prolific Japanese design studio Nendo has produced a line of T-shirts aimed at making the Hello Kitty cartoon character palatable for a male audience.

Radiograph Kitty

Owned by Sanrio – a Japanese branding company that specialises in Kawaii, or cute, cartoons – Hello Kitty is a girl character that looks like a white bobtail cat with no mouth, a yellow nose and a red bow by one ear.

The character features on a vast range of merchandise, with the brand worth an estimated $7 billion (£5 billion).

Its fan base mainly consisted of women, but due partly to a collaboration with Pen, the men's lifestyle magazine, men's T-shirt designs were required," said Nendo.

"Hello Kitty is a character that has many elements that 'stimulates the right brain' to naturally induce the feeling of 'cuteness'," said the studio. "On this basis we thought up a way to appeal to a new target group by 'stimulating the left brain'."