Hello Kitty started life in Japan as an image on a vinyl coin purse.

A Hello Kitty house.

Thirty-five years later, Hello Kitty has developed into a brand character with huge clout but no visible mouth, who lives with her parents and twin sister, and who offers everything from pencils, appliances and credit cards to a Hello Kitty jet and a Hello Kitty-themed maternity hospital near Taipei.

A Hello Kitty plane.
(Photo: Yamaguchi Yoshiaki/Wikimedia Commons)

Until this year, Hello Kitty lacked only one thing: her very own tartan. That’s now been taken care of, as the Scottish Register of Tartans can attest.

Now, there's a Hello Kitty tartan.
Designer Yuko Yamaguchi assists with the announcement.
(Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

If wearing Kitty’s pink plaid doesn’t appeal to you, you can get a tartan of your own, as long as you can pay for it. Design and registry is $1,500, plus another few hundred dollars for the actual fabric: silk is more than twice the price of wool.

Compare Hello Kitty's tartan, center, with the one for Coca-Cola, left, and whiskey, right. (tartanregister.gov.uk)

There’s no requirement to belong to a Scottish clan. Cities, police and firefighting units have their own tartans. There’s a Jewish tartan, and a Coca-Cola tartan in a rich, chocolate brown, with a bit of classic caramel and a hint of Coke’s signature red. So refreshing.

The Whisky tartan, introduced in 2007, is an example of how the use of color tells how the whiskey is made: the five yellow lines stand for the fields of barley; the black squares, for the peat or coal used to dry it. The blue stands for the natural water; the black lines, the warehouse walls; and the small white lines are for the bottle.

That’s not such a stretch, really. Weaving is a near-universal craft, dating back at least 5,000 years. Colored stripes were incorporated into a plain weave to indicate a wearer’s rank. The more colored stripes, the more status.

Globe-trotting tartan, comfortable on the Masai. (Via kiltmaker.blogspot.com)

Tartan is the globe-trotting cloth, found in 14th century Spain and 18th century Japan. There are tartans in the kingdom of Bhutan and among the Masai of Africa. It is said that tartans originated in the Caucasus Mountains of Southern Russia, and migrated through Europe and central Asia.

Fun with sheep. (Via arbroath.blogspot.com)

Things didn’t really get cooking until sheep herds increased in size. More wool meant the that the fabric which had started as the size of a small rug could now be a long piece of material between 12 and 15 feet long. Highlanders pleated this around their waists in folds. They pulled it over their heads like a hood. They used it for a blanket at night.

Colonel William Gordon of Fyvie, by Pompeo-Batoni.
(The National Trust of Scotland)

By 1730, the linen plain weave had evolved into a sophisticated twill weave, and the patterns had evolved from simple stripes and patterns into recognizable tartans (from the French word tartaine). The sequence laid down by the numbers of colored threads wound on a piece of wood, or sett-sticks, determined the pattern.

Tartan status: Hello, Kitty?
(Holt Renfrew Canada)

You can imagine how a lowly sheepherder would yearn for such magnificence. Certainly we do, or Burberry’s registered tartans wouldn’t induce such high prices.

Naturally, Hello Kitty finally had to have a tartan to call her own.

Tartan gets around. (Photo: LokiVHS)