Someone Had to Write the Obituary

The Eulogy as Cultural Timestamp

A writer at Dazed has published a Labubu obituary. Complete with the headline. Complete with the send-off. And honestly? The piece existing at all is more interesting than anything it argues.

This is what the end of a hype cycle looks like now — not a slow fade, not a quiet retirement to the back of a drawer. A formal declaration. A publication with cultural standing sits down, opens a document, and writes the death certificate for a plush keyring with pointed teeth. That's the ritual. That's how we process things in 2025.

The Dazed piece describes Labubu — the fluffy-eared, soulless-eyed collectible — as the dominant accessory of the moment. Swinging from designer bags at fashion shows, baby showers, weddings, picnics. The writer frames it as a kind of infestation, a thing that arrived everywhere at once and made itself at home on the clasp of whatever you were already carrying. An accessory for your accessory. A charm offensive, literally.

And now someone is writing its obituary. With contempt. With ceremony. Which means the cycle is complete.

What Compresses, What Remains

What's worth sitting with here isn't whether Labubu deserves the scorn — it's how fast the arc ran. The piece positions this as the tail end of a bag-charm craze that peaked in 2024, with Labubu emerging as the final, most maximalist expression of that moment. That's a trend lifespan measured in months, not years. Long enough to be everywhere. Short enough that the obituary writer can still remember when it started.

Fashion has always eaten its own enthusiasms. That's not new. What's new is the speed, and the self-awareness baked into the speed. The Dazed piece isn't just cultural commentary — it's a participant in the cycle it's describing. Declaring something dead is also a way of performing that you saw it coming. That you were never fully captured by it. That you were watching.

I find that interesting. Not cynical, exactly — more like honest. The fashion internet has developed its own immune response to hype, and that response now moves at roughly the same velocity as the hype itself. By the time something is everywhere, someone is already writing the obituary. The gap between peak saturation and formal burial has collapsed to nearly nothing.

There's something almost melancholy in that, if you're the kind of person who notices it. Not for the Labubu specifically — a pointed-tooth plush hanging from a Bottega doesn't need your grief. But for the idea that anything gets to just be for a while before the verdict comes in. The writer at Dazed clearly had enough. But the very sharpness of the piece suggests they were paying close attention all along.

That's the real tell. You don't write an obituary for something you ignored.