Only Fads: A Culture (and Economy) of Labubu

Fads are nothing new, but an online-first culture has made raw trendiness the primary cultural value, which is moving the base of cultural production away from the U.S.

Amanda Mull, Bloomberg: The Social Media Machine is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results

Mull’s article is a solid primer to the feeling of many educated Americans about contemporary pop culture at the moment: it's become parade of hard-to-comprehend global trends like Labubus and “Dubai chocolate” that seemingly go “viral” without a "backstory" or any clear connections to the cultural practices of existing groups.

Labubu and Dubai chocolate are clear examples of fads: They're fast-forming, short-lived conventions. They don't have significant intrinsic value, but moreover, everyone is aware their core value is trendiness itself. Even the most rabid consumers of Labubus know deep down that they will be replaced in the near future. Compare this to fashions, where many adopters believe that they are purchasing certain goods—e.g. skinny pants, wider pants—as a part of establishing a long-term authentic identity. Labubus and Dubai chocolate are basically just pure signifiers of internet knowledge: That thing you’ve seen online in a vertical video? I now have acquired it in real life.

But fads aren't new, so why does Labubu deserve any serious attention? Fads were also a big part of culture in the Fifties (e.g. hula hoops, phonebooth stuffing), but the difference today seems to be that our time-marking cultural moments are only fads. In Status and Culture, I linked this development directly to the sense of cultural stagnation: When everything is perceived to be a fad, most people won't adopt the novelty into their core identities. They will learn about them and may dabble in them, but they won't shift their entire identity to match the fad. This results in a much more conservative approach to self-presentation, causing overall aesthetics to change at a slower rate than before.

Kyla Scanlon: How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the American Economy

Scanlon’s (highly depressing piece) suggests that Labubu-like fads and memes aren’t just limited to culture but also explain the American economy. The stock market, I guess, has become a lot like “Livvy Rizzed Up Baby Gronk." (Ironically, the Chinese economy is not Labubu-oriented, but still prioritizes scientific research and industrial output over the consumption of fleeting signifiers.)

For all the talk about Labubus as a market success — $1+ billion in sales — I think the larger story is how much these fads have taken over our mindshare without our direct participation. Culture is never a pure reflection of consumer behavior, but a narrative.

Over the last ten months, I’ve been attempting to reduce the time I spend online, and one thing that helped me is making the belated observation that there are more internet news stories than there is actual news. This is Parkinson’s Law for media: “News stories expand so as to fill the space available,” and with online media, the space for news is practically infinite. On top of that, click-based ads incentivize every media outlet, legitimate or illegitimate, to pump out copycat stories on trendy topics. This results in even the tiniest consumer movements getting over-represented in the media.

Since the most erudite wing of the professional class has always hated fads, most of them will never buy a Labubu. But one thing that's changed in a post-modern, poptimist world is that "media literacy" requires knowing about all culture, high and low, and this entails, in 2025, learning about Labubus. The end result is that so many of us are consuming the narrative of Labubus whether we like it or not.

In writing this history of the 21st century, Blank Space, I noticed that one important marker of our era is the cultural success of widely loathed people, such as Paris Hilton, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. They all figured out a powerful media hack for which there is no known antidote: Sociopathic behavior spurs the media to write lots of stories, and even their haters have to spend a lot of time learning about the specific terrible thing they did that day to maintain their media literacy.

Culture is now built around this tension: There are engaged, paying consumers of Labubus (and an army of resellers), and there are sour, reluctant consumers of the Labubu narrative. The actual consumer economy, of course, is going to move towards people who pay the real money, and the second group works as a hype machine, even as they're wringing their hands.

We should assume this dynamic continues throughout the decade, which will further move cultural production away from American dominance. For fads, the most important factor for product success is widespread diffusion into online media — specifically, presence in short-form video platforms like TikTok, Douyin, and Instagram. This tips cultural production towards video-first cultures, where emerging middle-classes enthusiastically and earnestly consumer vertical videos rather than treat them with disdain while consuming them. For these emerging consumers, chasing online trendiness becomes their core identity, creating a new fashion based around the constant aggregation of fads.

This explains Mull's observation that these recent trends begin in places such as Dubai and China, where contemporary consumerism is extremely online and seemingly unrooted from long-standing cultural tradition. Labubu is a product from a mainland retail chain, PopMart, which arguably makes it the first mainland-originating global consumer trend. (Sorry, Feiyue sneakers, you never broke out of hipster circles.) Of course, PopMart is part of a larger cultural production network beyond China: the actual aesthetics are from Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung, and the status value came from Lisa, a Thai entertainer in a Korean pop group who put the dolls on her French luxury conglomerate brand bag. But that's exactly the new base of cultural production that is dominating the 21st century.

In this sense, Labubus do seem to be a defining moment of 2020s culture. For those interested in moving culture away from fads such as these, resistance requires much more than a refusal to consume. If fads are narratives as much as products, they need to be starved of engagement, as well. We haven't figured out how to do this yet. As you can see with this newsletter, I'm personally doing a terrible job.