Labubu Mania and Etsy Witches

You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry

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“Genre, medium, and format are secondary concerns and, in some instances, they seem to disappear entirely.” One piece of intellectual property inspires a feeding frenzy of podcast, documentary, and miniseries offshoots. Single episodes of streaming-service TV can run as long as a movie. Visual artists’ paintings appear on social media alongside the... See more

In a sense, this is another manifestation of “Power to the People.” While often viewed through the lens of socio-political or -economic strife, this flock toward the excessive and extravagant is a push against another type of commercialized institutionalism:  wellness .

From seductive night luxe, to innocent kidcore, it’s as

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The idea of being “in” is an economy in itself: streetwear drops, exclusive social clubs, and now, as we’ve seen, viral consumer social products, which we’ll be focusing on for this piece.