The first one I saw up close was hanging off a woman's tote on a tram, a fanged little thing with rabbit ears and a grin like it knew where you kept your money. The bag underneath it was the expensive part, or used to be. She was not looking at the bag. She was showing me the monster, the way you angle a new ring at a table, and I understood that the accessory and the object had swapped jobs. The tote was now the backdrop. The four-inch vinyl creature clipped to the zipper pull was the point.
That creature is a Labubu, drawn by the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung in 2015 for a folklore series called The Monsters, and sold in blind boxes by the Chinese company Pop Mart. Look at the seams on this thing and there is not much to see: it is a mass-produced plush or a hard PVC figure, what looks like a few dollars of materials, priced at twenty to thirty in the box. What has happened around it is the interesting part. Pop Mart has launched more than 300 Labubu styles since 2019, and by the company's own IP team the charms are now being clipped onto luxury bags and styled into custom couture, on the runway, during Paris Fashion Week in March. A toymaker is being talked about as a fashion house. That is not a metaphor anymore. It is a line on a licensing sheet.
The money luxury walked away from
Here is why anyone in fashion is paying attention, and it is not the toy. On the run-up through 2025, Pop Mart's market value climbed to around 34 billion dollars, more than Sanrio, Hasbro, and Mattel combined, the companies behind Hello Kitty, Transformers, and Barbie. The stock has since cooled to somewhere in the 25 to 30 billion range by mid-2026, so take the headline as a snapshot of a peak rather than a fixed fact. The revenue is steadier ground. Pop Mart's 2024 sales hit 13.04 billion yuan, about 1.8 billion dollars, more than double the year before, and The Monsters line that Labubu belongs to grew 726 percent in a single year to roughly a quarter of the whole company. Then it forecast the first half of 2025 up 200 percent on revenue and 350 percent on profit. Those are not toy-aisle numbers. Those are the numbers a luxury group would kill for and mostly is not getting.
Because the timing is the story. While Labubu was doing this, the people who buy real luxury were walking out. Bain and Altagamma count the active luxury customer base falling from about 400 million buyers in 2022 to 330 or 340 million in 2025, with more expected to leave, and Bain's Federica Levato told Business of Fashion that the industry "walked away from Gen Z," leaving what she called "a complete void in the market." A void is a business opportunity if you happen to sell a thirty-dollar version of belonging. eMarketer's read is that appetite for big-ticket purchases is muted while emotional spending on small luxuries is booming, and that the little monster is edging out the bag charms that leading maisons used to sell you for a few hundred euros. Call it the lipstick effect with a face. When the coat is out of reach, you buy the lipstick; when the bag is out of reach, apparently you buy the thing that hangs off it.
A scale model of the handbag economy
What convinces me this is not just a toy fad wearing a fashion costume is that the whole apparatus around Labubu is a scale model of the handbag economy. There is the manufactured scarcity: the blind box, the secret variant at roughly one-in-seventy-two odds, the sold-out drop. There is the resale market, where a limited Vans collaboration sold on eBay for 10,585 dollars after 96 bids, a figure that cost twenty in a shop. There is the auction house: in June 2025 a one-of-a-kind human-sized mint-green Labubu sold in Beijing for 1.08 million yuan, about 150,000 dollars, in what was billed as the world's first auction dedicated to the toy. And there are the fakes, so common they have a nickname, "Lafufu," which is exactly the counterfeit shadow that trails every Birkin. Scarcity, resale, provenance, forgery. Swap the vinyl for calfskin and it is the same market, run at one percent of the price.
The luxury houses have noticed, and their response tells you which way the respect is flowing. Moynat, which sits inside LVMH, partnered with Kasing Lung on a run of bags and charms printed with his monsters, and Bernard Arnault himself reportedly stopped by the launch during Art Basel Paris. Zara put a Kasing Lung figurine in its fiftieth-anniversary Paris pop-up at 529 euros. A retrospective called "Monsters by monsters: Now and then" opened on rue de Turenne timed to the shows. When a house whose totes start north of two thousand dollars borrows the aura of a blind-box toy, the toy is not the one seeking legitimacy.
It replaced the starter bag, but it is no investment
Is the monster replacing the entry-level handbag? For the moment, in the wallet, close to yes. The starter-luxury ladder used to be a real staircase, climbed by age: the small leather good in your twenties, the bag in your thirties, the coat later on, each purchase teaching you to want the next one, each one feeding the house that made it. Price the first rung out of reach, which the houses spent a decade doing, and you do not keep that customer for the coat. She spends the same emotional thirty dollars on something that gives her the drop, the hunt, the resale daydream, and the little jolt of status, all without the down payment. Pop Mart built the ladder's bottom rung out of vinyl and kept it.
I will not tell you it is an investment, and neither will the people who actually run auctions. The experts on the record keep reaching for the same comparison, Beanie Babies, and they are right to. The six-figure sales are one-off prototypes, not the box you can buy; for almost everyone the realistic ceiling on the rarest obtainable piece is a few thousand dollars, and most will settle back toward the cost of the plastic. Buy the monster because it makes you grin on the tram, the way that woman was grinning. That is a fair trade for thirty dollars. Buy it because you think it is a handbag that appreciates, and you have just learned the oldest lesson in my beat, which is that the industry's real product was never the object. It was the wanting. They have simply worked out how to sell you the wanting for less.
