How Fashion Fell in Love With Toys
The newest It accessory isn't a sleek East-West bag or a viral shoe. It's something far more playful: a fuzzy-haired doll that dangles from a model's arm on the runway, or a stuffed rabbit clutched as casually as one might tote a Le Teckel. For fall 2025, these puckish accessories were anointed as the runway's most surprising phenomenon. At Fendi, they came in the form of Cabbage Patch Kids-like dolls, while Kenzo and Simone Rocha turned stuffed animals into bags and clothing. And at Coach, Stuart Vevers ushered bunny slippers and a menagerie of assorted cute critters onto the catwalk. Not to mention the trendy Labubu dolls swinging from designer bags all throughout fashion month.
Ruby Redstone, a fashion historian and author of the Substack newsletter Old Fashioned, has been a self-described 'super-nerdy major toy collector' her whole life. For her, collecting toys was an introduction to the world of artists like Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. Normally, when parsing fashion's current mood, Redstone avoids painting with a broad brush. 'I tend not to say, 'We're looking for cute stuff because the world is hard and sad.' But I do feel like we're in a rather extreme case of that right now,' she says. 'The more tough things get politically, it seems, the more everyone is drawn to these dopamine-inducing cute things that we can sell. And I'm not mad about it. It's a trend that I'm completely at peace with, because it does bring me joy.'
For Lucy Bishop, a specialist in handbags and fashion at Sotheby's, the trend is 'absolutely connected to consumers embracing escapism to distract themselves from the pressures of modern life. The childlike comfort factor these playful designs bring is a welcome distraction.'
It's also driven by the voracious appetite millennials and Gen Z have for nostalgia, whether it's the Y2K revival or assorted '90s trends. Redstone notes that they 'came of age with Hello Kitty and UglyDolls, and now they're looking at it with rose-colored lenses because they didn't experience it or couldn't participate in it the first time around—and now they can.' Powered by nostalgic yearning, people are also snapping up past luxury crazes in this vein, like the Fendi Bag Bug charm or Givenchy's Bambi keychains. (Going yet further back, Bishop points to the offbeat designs of Franco Moschino and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.)
All of this might feel at odds with fashion's recent focus on quiet luxury, capsule wardrobes, and office-ready dressing. For several seasons, young people have been obsessed with looking more adult and put-together, but a general fatigue seems to have settled around this idea. If the totems of adulthood, including homeownership and stable jobs, are increasingly out of reach, why not replace them with totems of a more innocent time? (Interestingly, Bishop notes that just as we have tweens who are obsessed with adult beauty products and elaborate skin care routines, 'we are witnessing consumers in their 20s, 30s, even 40s become obsessed with childlike products. The roles seem to have been reversed.')
That said, Redstone reminds me that a penchant for winsome decoration dates far further back than the heyday of the Bag Bug. 'In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, you had women making chatelaines, which were essentially key chains that attached to your waist. They had useful things on them, like scissors and an eyeglass.' But people still decorated them with jewelry and charms, she says. 'This idea of adding little charms that 'show a piece of our personality' is essential to human nature—but showing our personality specifically through a plastic toy is quite contemporary.'
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