Social media backlash over excessive consumption very often focuses on superyachts and private jets. But occasionally something far smaller and sillier earns the ire of internet users.
The latter was the case when screengrabs of socialite Kathy Hilton’s then-recent birthday bash surfaced on Reddit’s r/Anticonsumption.
Although the narration wasn’t available on Reddit, most of the images included audio captions, and a little digging turned up the original TikTok video.
“Kathy Hilton had a Labubu vending machine,” the first read.
A still image showed the interior of a luxurious space — identified by a location tag as the Hotel Bel Air — and a twining floral arch studded with Labubu figurines.
That arch was erected around what appeared to be a customized claw machine. It was created in collaboration with jewelry designer Anna Zuckerman. In addition to what was clearly a vast quantity of then-trendy Labubu figurines, it also held jewelry boxes.
For those fortunate enough to have missed the trend, Labubu figurines were a social media fad earlier this year. The phenomenon was similar to that of Stanley cups or Squishmallows before them.
The overwhelming presence of Labubus encouraged people to collect them. It’s yet another example of social media’s overconsumption problem. Every fad’s meteoric rise is matched by an attendant fall in popularity — and for items, that means trash fodder.
Buying one or two small figurines is one thing, but these short-lived frenzies occur at scale by their nature. When Labubus are “out,” they wind up in landfills en masse, and Reddit users were angered by the conspicuous excess.
“I usually don’t get righteously furious at silly little doll trends, I usually just like to let people have fun, but the Labubus are so Ultra Capitalism I just sincerely don’t know how to deal with it,” one admitted.
“Sucker born every minute. Labubu, Stanley Cups, NFTs, Prime, Pokémon Cards,” another observed. “I guess this is just the way of things. Always some stupid, overpriced product for people to start a crazy trend over.”
At the end of the day, dipping a toe into any of these fads is not going to make or break the environment, and most of what’s shown in the video feels pretty tame in a vacuum compared to a lot of what the very rich do with their funds, but the point is to highlight the excessiveness on display when a fad is taken to the nth degree and ends up leading to millions of people all wanting dozens of items that don’t provide a practical function.
