A furry fiend with rabbit ears and a maniacal grin has recently been spotted twerking next to the singer Lizzo, baring its teeth on the former soccer star David Beckham’s Instagram, and flopping against a woman’s Chanel bag while wearing its own Tic Tac–size Chanel bag. The creature in question is Labubu—a soft-bellied plushie that the Chinese company Pop Mart began distributing in 2019, and that has, in the past year, gained hordes of admirers. In 2024, Pop Mart reported a more than 700 percent increase in the stuffie’s sales. People have been doling out anywhere from about $30 to $150,000 a toy. At Brooklyn raves, adults hop around under neon lights with Labubus clipped to their belt loops. The devotion, at times, has turned almost ferocious; Pop Mart decided to suspend in-person sales of Labubu in the United Kingdom after reports of chaos at stores.
Commentators have offered all sorts of theories as to why Labubu has become a sensation. One factor might be scarcity: Each new Labubu release on Pop Mart’s online store tends to sell out in minutes. Another might be surprise: The plushie arrives in a blind box. (It could be pink or gray; wear overalls or hold a Coke.) Some people have suggested that the Labubu hype is a product of a trickle-down celebrity effect, or that the toy has become a gay icon.
But the way I see it, the cult of Labubu is simply an extension of the phenomenon known as “kidulthood,” in which the boundary between childhood and adulthood keeps growing fuzzier and fuzzier. In the past few years, more American adults have been buying stuffed animals—some, researchers have told me, in an effort to reject staid versions of adulthood and inject more play into grown-up life. These adults have usually kept their plushies at home, relegating them to bookshelves and beds. Labubus, though, are “public displays of cuteness,” Erica Kanesaka, an Emory University professor and cute-studies scholar, told me in an email. Devotees carry Labubu into subway cars, office cubicles, and dental schools. They clock into shifts at KFC with the toy literally attached to their hip, and take it along for their workdays as football players or airline pilots.
Adults in other countries—Japan, perhaps most notably—have long worn objects featuring cute characters, such as Hello Kitty, out and about, hooked to bags and key chains. In the 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon to see white-collar Japanese salarymen with Hello Kitty accessories dangling from their phones. The trend, Simon May, a philosopher and the author of The Power of Cute, told me, might have been born of a postwar rejection of overt aggression: After World War II, cute aesthetics were one way that Japan revamped its public-facing image. The country, May said, changed its self-presentation “180 degrees from militarism to pacifism.” But in the United States, loving cute objects has historically been written off as escapism at best and a worrying swing toward infancy at worst. Adults who embraced childlike things were “seen to be irresponsibly regressive, morally immature, and refusing to play their full part in society,” May said in an email after we spoke. As recently as 2020, in an article about plushies, one writer self-consciously described her stuffed hound as her “deep dark secret.”
Yet, as I’ve previously reported, this defensiveness about loving cute objects has been gradually dissipating, part of a century-long evolution in which childhood has come to be seen as a protected life stage. Nowadays, May said, “to be childlike also has an increasingly positive connotation in terms of openness to ideas and freedom from dogmatism.” At the same time, attitudes about what it means to be an adult are shifting. Many have assumed that children are supposed to “grow out of vulnerability” when they become adults, Sandra Chang-Kredl, a professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, who has studied adults’ attachments to stuffed animals, told me. But more and more, people are pushing back on that idea. Years ago, “it would have been hard to admit that, let’s say, Oh, I have anxiety,” Chang-Kredl said. “Today, there’s no shame involved in it.”
Pop Mart has capitalized on this transformation, marketing Labubus—and its other collectibles—specifically to young adults. The company’s social-media posts seem to be aimed at Monday-hating, coffee-drinking workers who might log in to Zoom meetings from disastrously messy rooms or prefer to be outside, playing with buddies (or toys), rather than reporting to an office. Evidence suggests that this approach has been successful; one analysis of Pop Mart’s web traffic found that 39 percent of visitors to the online store in April ranged in age from 25 to 34.
Shame dies hard, though, which might be another reason Labubu has gained traction. Within the realm of cute things, a demonic-looking stuffie is more “ugly-cute”—adorable, monstrous, deliberately weird. (Ugly-cuteness is also by no means a new phenomenon; think of the pygmy-hippo sensation Moo Deng, toys such as UglyDolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, or the eternal appeal of the pug.) People “feel that they themselves are a little bit edgy,” Joshua Dale, a cute-studies professor at Chuo University, in Tokyo, told me, “for liking something that some people don’t like.”
As with any popular trend, Labubu does have its haters—or at least some tongue-in-cheek provocateurs. People have suggested (semi-jokingly) that the toy is possessed, possibly by a demon called Pazuzu. The singer Katy Perry, at a recent concert in Australia, used her mic to smack a Labubu out of a fan’s hand. “No Labubus!” she commanded sternly. Still, Labubu’s creepy-cute duality does feel very of this moment, in line with a certain strain of the culture that seeks to undercut anything that feels too buttoned-up. Consider the popularity of “brat”—an irony-tinged aesthetic that embraces the messy and ugly-cute over the prepped and polished. Last year, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber described the “brat” mood as “a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty.” He also noted that the singer Charli XCX, whose songs affirm that the party-girl life has no age limit, and pop artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan seem to be making music offering “the assurance that growing up, in the conventional sense, is just optional.”
Wearing Labubu, especially on a designer purse or a backpack meant for grown-ups, is a choice that speaks in a similar register. It signals a “playful attitude to life,” May told me, “a winking at the world.” Monday will come around again, with its dreaded wake-up alarms and emails. But according to the logic of kidulthood, you might feel a tiny bit better if you bring a devilish tchotchke to that 9 a.m. meeting.
