Why Is Fashion So Obsessed With Labubu?
The ultimate recession-core collectible
Are you even considered “cool” if you don’t own a Labubu these days?
You know the drill. Everybody has at least one, so you go get one. You wait in line for hours. And then, when the moment comes, you don’t choose your Labubu. You get a box. You hope. You pray. You open. And then you scream — in delight or despair. That moment is the magic trick. But it’s not accidental. It’s wired.
You get that rush of dopamine, and suddenly everything feels okay again. The fact that a Labubu comes in a blind box makes everything sound like a consumer behavior experiment. We’re talking about brain chemistry here. Studies have shown that dopamine, the chemical that lights up when we feel pleasure or reward, spikes more in anticipation than in the actual moment of reward — and then, you keep getting those tiny doses of dopamine each time you see that little cute creature (or plenty of them, check @bryanboy’s for a reference) dangling from your luxurious Hermès bag. Congratulations, babe — you’re part of the Labubu club!
But somewhere inside this Labubu fantasy lies something wild that looks a lot like playing with slot machines. Because what happens if your next box doesn’t contain the rarest one, the cutest one, or the one missing from your lineup? You’ll probably just have to try again.
Pop Mart, the company behind Labubu, knows all about this. It’s not selling toys — it’s selling a structured sense of addictive possibility, and it figured out that this is exactly what this generation of buyers is craving. It feels a lot like how the world is looking right now: we all need and crave a sense of some possibility — for happiness, comfort, and maybe even peace.
And if this was also the ultimate goal for Labubu’s creator, Kasing Lung, when he built its concept in 2015, then this man might be a genius.
Labubu have proliferated and are almost a cult collectible today. They’ve become the most desirable fashion accessory — to everyone’s surprise — and it feels as if we’ve fallen into a cultural regression loop. Not in a negative sense, but in a reclaiming of our own childhood nostalgia.
We’ve done this before. Not with Labubu, but with Pokémon cards, limited edition Barbies, Kinder Sorpresa toys, stickers — or, for the very old like me, Digimon keychains. Generations of kids have grown up chasing the thrill of randomized collecting: trading at school, begging for one more pack, hoping the next one had the holographic Charizard.
And now we’re living this again — but this time, during adulthood.
If we try to see it from that perspective, then maybe owning a Labubu looks like the sweetest investment in a re-parenting kind of way. As adult consumers, we’re recreating the emotional conditions of early collecting: the joy of surprise.
It’s childhood re-skinned for an adult world that’s become depressing, chaotic, overstimulated — and in desperate need of low-standard pleasure in the middle of what seems to be a full-blown recession. A brief portal to a version of ourselves that believed something amazing could always be just one box away.
Of course, we could analyze this cynically too — late capitalism, consumer addiction, the infantilization of millennials (and now we’ve passed the disease to Gen Z). But there’s something oddly comforting in how these toys give structure to joy. In a culture that’s fragmented and algorithmic, Labubu creatures might offer a ritual, a mystery, and a memory of sweetness. This shared obsession, seen that way, might mean that maybe Labubu isn’t just cute. Maybe it’s therapeutic.
And let’s just face it — there are bigger problems in the world than a line of people wanting to own a toy.