Labubu and the mechanics of modern trend diffusion
A few weeks ago in Amsterdam, we walked past a queue. Not your average Rijksmuseum or Van Gogh museum queue. One that wrapped (literally) around the block in narrow streets. People sitting on folding chairs. Sharing snacks. Checking phones.
At the end of it? A tiny shop selling Labubu figurines. The unfriendly bouncer who thought we were skipping the line insisted we’d join the queue. ‘See you in six hours’ he added, with a grin.
Honestly? Until that moment, I’d never heard of Labubu. A weird little character, somewhere between cute and slightly ugly. The kind of thing you’d expect to find in a collector’s cabinet, not the hands of international trendsetters.
But here it was. With hype. With scarcity. With devotion. That’s how Labubu works. Not as a product, but as a signal.
Originally designed by Kasing Lung, distributed by POP MART, it came from the dense, hybrid world of East Asian designer toys where kawaii meets streetwear, and every item feels like a limited edition mood.
But Labubu didn’t rise from that world. It was launched out of it. Catapulted into cultural consciousness by media coverage and celebrity endorsement. First were niche blogs. Then came social media. A Korean rapper.
Then came the Dua Lipa moment. One photo. A Labubu attached to her handbag. No hashtag. No explanation. No sponsored glow. And yet, instantly: validation. What Berger and Milkman would call social transmission value. What Bourdieu might call symbolic capital. What most people would just call: cool or in 2025 speak a vibe.
Because Dua Lipa doesn’t endorse. She signals. And in today’s media economy, a signal is all it takes.
Vogue jumped on the bandwagon and called it the new object of desire. The Guardian ran a piece on the art toy invasion. Traditional media giving a nudge. A knowing wink. Not telling you what to buy but telling you this is what people like you are buying.
This is how things spread now. Not in slow diffusion curves. Not from innovators to laggards in neat predictable Gaussian curved waves. Trends today collapse that timeline. What used to take years, now takes months, maybe weeks.
TikTok doesn’t wait for you to catch up. Instagram doesn’t care about origin stories. What matters is how fast something feels big. And Labubu feels big.
It’s shareable. Playful. Strange enough to be interesting. Familiar enough to be safe. And when a few people with cultural weight start carrying it around, others follow. Not because they’re copying, but because they’re participating.
Labubu isn’t about character design or collectible value. It’s about presence. Proof that you’re paying attention to the same things as the people who matter. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “good” or “designed well” or even what it is.
It matters that Dua Lipa touched it. That Vogue wrote it up. That someone at your agency desk placed one next to their laptop and didn’t say a word.
That’s how status works. Less explained, more implied. Labubu is a timestamp. It tells the world: you were there when the algorithm whispered now.
