Sensational headlines there always have been, but these days you could be forgiven for assuming that everyone, everywhere is suddenly wearing the same jacket, shoes, jeans – even transdermal patches. While trending pieces tend to be extra conspicuous in, say, east London, for the most part, when you step outside, you’ll see very few people who dress alike. And most of them, when questioned, will have no idea what a transdermal patch actually is. And yet, one trend that seems to have genuinely proliferated is the Labubu: a £13 collectible key-ring doll seen dangling from the handbags of Blackpink’s Lisa, Rihanna and Dua Lipa, featured in 1.2 million TikToks, and accompanying the hundreds of people queuing outside the Pop Mart store – the Chinese retailer is the only place you can buy original Labubus – on Oxford Street at 4.30am last Sunday morning.
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First conceived in 2015 by the Hong Kong-born, Netherlands-based artist Kasing Lung in his children’s book, Monsters (and later made polypropylene care of Pop Mart in 2019) the snaggle-toothed anthropomorph is, admittedly, cute, in a sort of “I grew this in a Petri dish and it is now my child” way. And the fact that they’re sold via blind boxes – meaning you don’t know which style of Labubu you’ve acquired until they’re unwrapped – makes the bond all the more surreptitious, the purchase all the more obsessive. So much so, in fact, that the Labubu is now the number one collectibles release on resale platform StockX, while Depop has noticed a 376 per cent increase in searches since December and the latest Pop Mart release sold out worldwide. The rush to secure one has been described, without much exaggeration, as “literally the Hunger Games”. I don’t like it.