Labubus Ate My Daughter

Opinion|Labubus Ate My Daughter

My 10-year-old daughter’s entry into the universe of Labubu was innocent enough: She was a kid who wanted a doll.

So how did my usually thoughtful and steady 10-year-old wind up in tears in the middle of a bleeping, blooping tween arcade full of claw machines in downtown Montreal? This is, in part, a story about getting stuck in the false promise of a rampant trend cycle — in this case, one involving ugly monster dolls. It’s also a story about how my daughter and I found our a way out again.

Labubu dolls — which look like a cross between a Maurice Sendak “Where the Wild Things Are” monster and a Monchhichi — became extremely trendy a year ago when a Labubu was seen dangling from the handbag of Lalisa Manobal, who goes by Lisa, of the South Korean pop group Blackpink.

Après Lalisa, la delulu: Labubus popped up among celebrities and style influencers, ornamenting the bags of everyone from Rihanna and Dua Lipa to the soccer legend David Beckham and the tennis champion Naomi Osaka. By last summer, Labubus had gone from being a weird totem of adult fashion juvenilia — a junky-looking fuzzy toy hanging, almost as counterpoint, from $100,000 Birkin bags or the sports totes of millionaire athletes — to a mainstream object of intense juvenile desire. Labubus, like Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, Tamagotchis or Beanie Babies before them, became the thing kids wanted simply because all kids wanted it.

Naïvely, I thought I’d sidestepped the whole mishegas when a family member took my daughter out for dinner in Montreal’s Chinatown and bought her, for $10, a knockoff Labubu — what the kids refer to as Lafufus. She named her doll Tyler Janeiro (after her most recent musical hero Tyler, the Creator and her favorite body spray, Sol de Janeiro) and sewed small, ingenious clothes for it out of scraps of fabric. She excavated accessories for Tyler Janeiro from her toy bin, culling odds and ends from her American Girl doll and Calico Critters collections left over from other toy phases she’d recently outgrown.

I was initially fine with this temporary phenomenon because I thought Labubus were, in the end, merely a toy: something that a child — even one who is growing up quickly — could play with. Like many parents of Gen Alpha kids, I’m both astounded and terrified by the amount of time my child wants to spend on online shopping sites like Temu or Shein. So I liked that Labubus, like the Furbys or Tickle Me Elmos of yore, were difficult to acquire. You couldn’t just order one with the click of a button. You had to strategize, or at least to wait.