Dolls

WILKO is now selling official Labubu dolls – but shoppers have been infuriated by the hefty price tags.

The dolls, which originate from Hong Kong, are retailing for £50 at the high street chain.

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Customers took to social media to express their anger at the prices of the fang-toothed, fuzzy dolls.

One said on Instagram: ” The prices are horrendous.”

Another added: “Get stuffed.”

While a third said: “Disgusting prices.”

The dolls are currently available both in Wilko stores and online.

Wilko returned to UK high streets last year after announcing it would be closing all of its shops back in October 2023.

The Labubu doll was first introduced in 2015 but has soared in popularity through celebrity endorsements and its ‘ugly-cute’ design.

They are particularly popular across Southern Asia, with K-Pop performer, Lisa, sharing the fluffy doll on her Instagram story which skyrocketed the craze around the toy.

The hashtag Labubu has appeared more than a million times on TikTok.

Where else can you purchase Labubu’s

The figures are available on the Pop Mart platform but consumers have to be incredibly savvy to get them as they are often sold out.

However, if you live near London, Pop Mart’s new flagship shop has just opened on Oxford Street, which often has exclusive drops of the dolls.

These retail for £32, far less than Wilko.

The doll is also available on Amazon for much cheaper prices, although highly sought after editions can sell for upwards of three figures.

You might have more luck looking on second hand retailers such as Vinted or Depop, who often sell high quality items for half the price.

If you don’t want to purchase the item, you can even rent the dolls.

You can borrow the charms for around £4 a day on platforms such as By Rotation.

Growing number of fakes

Not only have the dolls risen to extremely high prices, there is huge number of counterfeits arriving in the UK.

Out of the 259,000 fake toys that arrived in the UK this year, 90% have been Labubu dolls.

Experts value this haul at nearly £3.3million.

Many of these toys fail safety checks for banned chemicals and pose significant choking hazards.

However, despite these safety concerns, IPO research said that 92% of customer we’re aware they we’re buying counterfeit products, but that the price was more important.

How to avoid buying fake toys

Many customers are not aware that they are buying fakes, but the IPO research found that 58% would think twice before purchasing if they knew the safety risks.

Customers should stick to there trusted retailers and official branded websites to avoid purchasing fakes.

Additionally, prices that look ‘to good to be true’ are likely to imply a fake item.

You should also look thoroughly through the reviews before purchasing, look beyond the first few.

When the toy arrives you should look for a UKCA safety mark and a UK or EU contact on the pacakaging.

The packaging should also look of high standard and not have any immediate signs of wear.

For Labubu’s particular, collectors suggest looking for signs such as brightness of the packaging, pop mart stamp on their foot, number of teeth of the dolls should have (nine) and the presence of the a QR code, to ensure the validity of the doll.

England women’s rugby union side will become the first UK sports team to partner with Barbie – but the deal has been launched without any of the brand’s famous dolls.

Athlete Dina Asher-Smith and boxer Nicola Adams have previously been immortalised in plastic, but the Red Roses’ range is initially restricted to t-shirts, hoodies and replica balls.

“The collaboration aims to inspire the next generation of female rugby players through grassroots initiatives, funding, merchandise and powerful storytelling,” said the Rugby Football Union.

Toy maker Mattel, the company behind Barbie, will make a £20,000 donation to the RFU as part of the deal to increase girls’ access to clubs and coaching in England.

Mattel has recreated a host of sporting figures as Barbie dolls, including American Olympic champion gymnast Gabby Douglas, fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, snowboarder Chloe Kim and golfer Lorena Ochoa.

London 2012 Olympic champion Adams, world champion sprinter Asher-Smith and skateboarder Sky Brown are among the Britons who have also been commemorated.

The partnership could yet expand, with England hot favourites for the Rugby World Cup on home soil. Their campaign begins on Friday, 22 August against the United States in Sunderland.

Barbie has previously been criticised for promoting unrealistic body types.

In her 2000 book Body Wars, psychologist Margo Maine wrote that, external if Barbie were scaled up to adult height, she would have a figure within the guidelines for diagnosing anorexia.

The brand introduced different body, hair and skin types to its range in 2016 and the 2023 movie Barbie, licensed by Mattel, confronted the gender norms and body image the doll had previously been associated with.

When her doll was released in 2020, Asher-Smith was pleased it accurately depicted her body.

“Most importantly for me there was the muscle tone, because I think it is really, really important the young girls see all aspects of femininity,” she said.

THE viral brand behind Labubu dolls will soon be on sale at one of Britain’s biggest toy chains at stores across the country.

From today, shoppers will be able to find toys from the highly sought-after brand.

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The Entertainer will see POP MART toys at select stores around the UK, as the start of a larger nationwide roll-out in coming months.

POP MART has grown its global audience, particularly with consumers’ increasing love for collectible toys like Labubu dolls.

The company, based in China, has pioneered the collectable toy market that is for both children and adults by merging art, fashion and pop culture.

They have revealed UK fans fans will be able to get their hands on iconic blind box collectables from POP MART.

This includes limited-edition favourites like MOLLY and SKULLPANDA which will be at select The Entertainer stores today.

The brand is already available at the latest The Entertainer store in Bluewater.

Six locations are included in the trial of POP MART products at The Entertainer, before they are rolled-out to additional stores nationwide in coming months.

The stores where the toys can be found include:

• Manchester Arndale
• Kingston The Bentall Centre
• Lakeside Shopping Centre
• Milton Keynes Centre: MK
• Sheffield Meadowhall
• Stratford Westfield

Coming in mystery-style blind boxes, a surprise figure is contained inside.

This has added to the growing excitement and demand for these products, which have even been popular amongst celebrities like Dua Lipa and Rihanna.

Chief Product Officer at The Entertainer, Brian Proctor, said: “As the POP MART phenomenon continues to rapidly grow, we’re thrilled to reveal that The Entertainer will stock the popular toys in selected stores.

“The upcoming arrival of POP MART at The Entertainer highlights our ongoing commitment to offering innovative and exciting products to our customers. In addition to the arrival of POP MART, we will continue to ensure that our diverse product range offers plenty of choices for toy fans across the country.”

The Entertainer has over 160 stores across the UK, with thousands of toys and games to offer customers.

It also provides through a thousand concessions like Tesco and Matalan, as well as trading internationally and online.

News of the products coming to the UK comes just as huge crowds have been swarming to toy stores to snap up the viral Labubu Dolls at POP MART stores countries across the world.

A queue in the German city of Berlin was seen extending all the way around the block of a POP MART store as it just opened with Labubu dolls.

The craze for these collectable toys has also being going off online.

TikTokers have been raving about the collection of new plush toys that have labelled the “next Labubus“.

The Wakuku dolls have been compared to Labubus, and shoppers are also able to get a blind box of the toys online.

These toys have really taken the internet by storm – with Chinese toymaker POP MART’s valuation skyrocketing to £31.6bn.

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In “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” playwright Lucas Hnath cheekily proposes an answer to a question that has haunted the theater for more than a century: Whatever happened to Nora after she walked out on her marriage at the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama, “A Doll’s House”?

The door slam that concludes Ibsen’s play ushered in a revolution in modern drama. After Nora’s exit, anything was possible on the stages of respectable European playhouses. Conventional morality was no longer a choke hold on dramatic characters, who were allowed to set dangerous new precedents for audiences that may have been easily shocked but were by no means easily deterred.

Elizabeth Reaser and Jason Butler Harner in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

“A Doll’s House, Part 2,” which opened Sunday at Pasadena Playhouse under the direction of Jennifer Chang, is a sequel with a puckish difference. Although ostensibly set 15 years after Nora stormed out on Torvald and her three children, the play takes place in a theatrical present that has one antique-looking shoe in the late 19^th century and one whimsical sneaker in the early 21^st.

The hybrid nature of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” isn’t just reflected in the costume design. The language of the play moves freely from the declamatory to the profane, with some of its funniest moments occurring when fury impels a character to unleash some naughty modern vernacular.

More crucially, comedy and tragedy are allowed to coexist as parallel realities. Hnath has constructed “A Doll’s House, Part 2” as a modern comedy of ideas, divided into a series of confrontations in which characters get to thrash out different perspectives on their shared history.

Elizabeth Reaser in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Chang stages the play like a courtroom drama, with a portion of the audience seated on the stage like a jury. The spare (if too dour) set by Wilson Chin, featuring the door that Nora made famous and a couple of rearranged chairs, allows for the brisk transit of testimony in a drama that lets all four characters have their say.

Nora (played with a touch too much comic affectation by Elizabeth Reaser) has become a successful author of controversial women’s books espousing radical ideas about the trap of conventional marriage. She has returned to the scene of her domestic crime out of necessity.

Torvald (portrayed with compelling inwardness by Jason Butler Harner), her stolid former husband, never filed the divorce papers. She’s now in legal jeopardy, having conducted business as an unmarried woman. And her militant feminist views have won her enemies who would like nothing more than to send her to prison.

Kahyun Kim in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Nora needs Torvald to do what he was supposed to have done years ago: officially end their marriage. But not knowing how he might react to her reemergence, she makes arrangements to strategize privately with Anne Marie (Kimberly Scott), the old nanny who raised Nora’s children in her absence and isn’t particularly inclined to do her any favors.

After Torvald and Anne Marie both refuse to cooperate with her, Nora has no choice but to turn to her daughter, Emmy (crisply played by Kahyun Kim). Recently engaged to a young banker, Emmy has chosen the road that her mother abandoned, a distressing realization for Nora, who had hoped that her example would have inaugurated a new era of possibility for women.

Hnath works out the puzzle of Nora’s dilemma as though it were a dramatic Rubik’s Cube. The play hasn’t any ax to grind. If there’s one prevailing truth, it’s that relationships are murkier and messier than ideological arguments.

Jason Butler Harner in “A Doll’s House Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Nora restates why she left her marriage and explains as best she can the reasons she stayed away from her children all these years. But her actions, however necessary, left behind a tonnage of human wreckage. “A Doll’s House, Part 2” offers a complex moral accounting. As each character’s forcefully held view is added to the ledger sheet, suspense builds over how the playwright will balance the books.

Each new production of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” works out the math in a slightly different way. The play had its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2017 in an elegant production that was somewhat more somber than the Broadway production that opened shortly after and earned Laurie Metcalf a well-deserved Tony for her performance.

The play found its voice through the Broadway developmental process, and Metcalf’s imprint is unmistakable in the rhythms of Nora’s whirligig monologues and bracing retorts. Metcalf is the rare actor who can lunge after comedy without sacrificing the raw poignancy of her character.

Elizabeth Reaser, left, and Kimberly Scott in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Reaser adopts a humorous mode but it feels forced. More damagingly, it doesn’t seem as if Hnath’s Nora has evolved all that much from the skittishly coquettish wife of Ibsen’s play. The intellectual arc of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” suffers from the mincing way Reaser introduces the character, with little conviction for Nora’s feminist principles and only a superficial sense of the long, exhausting road of being born before your time.

The early moments with Scott’s Anne Marie are unsteady. Reaser’s Nora comes off as a shallow woman oblivious of her privilege, which is true but only partly so. Scott has a wonderful earthy quality, but I missed the impeccable timing of Jayne Houdyshell’s Anne Marie, who could stop the show with an anachronistic F-bomb. Chang’s staging initially seems like a work-in-progress.

The production is galvanized by the excellent performances of Harner and Kim. Harner reveals a Torvald changed by time and self-doubt. Years of solitude, sharpened by intimations of mortality, have cracked the banker’s sense of certainty. He blames Nora for the hurt he’ll never get over, but he doesn’t want to go down as the paragon of bad husbands. He too would like a chance to redeem himself, even if (as Harner’s canny performance illustrates) character is not infinitely malleable. Bad habits endure.

Kimberly Scott in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Kim’s Emmy holds her own against Nora even as her proposed solution to her mother’s dilemma involves some questionable ethics. Nora may be disappointed that her daughter is making such conformist choices, but Emmy sees no reason why the mother she never knew should feel entitled to shape her life. The brusquely controlled way Kim’s Emmy speaks to Nora hints at the ocean of unresolved feelings between them.

The production is somewhat hampered by Anthony Tran’s cumbersome costumes and Chin’s grimly rational scenic design. Elizabeth Harper’s lighting enlivens the dull palette, but I missed the surreal notes of the South Coast Repertory and Broadway stagings. Hnath creates his own universe, and the design choices should reflect this wonderland quality to a jauntier degree.

But Chang realizes the play’s full power in the final scene between Nora and Torvald. Reaser poignantly plunges the depths of her character, as estranged husband and wife share what the last 15 years have been like for them.

“A Doll’s House” was considered in its time to be politically incendiary. Hnath’s sequel, without squelching the politics, picks up the forgotten human story of Ibsen’s indelible classic.