The story goes that Wang Momo (王卯卯), an undergraduate at the Communication University of China, was doodling on her blog one day and came up with a peculiar yet distinct rabbit-like creature. Built with Snoopy proportions, it also had no mouth and only had slits for eyes. Its name was Tuzki (兔斯基). Three months later, Wang made an animated emoticon of it. (Emoticons are icon-sized images used to express emotion or to “make a face” in text-only online conversations. They are especially popular in China.) Over the course of the following year, Wang continued to animate Tuzki performing various actions, …

As the slogan goes: “Shulong: The comfortable and stylish vintage sneakers from China.” Shulong, or, literally, “comfortable dragon” is the latest entrant in the race to become the first vintage Chinese brand to endear itself to international consumers from Williamsburg to Chinatown, and although it has yet to achieve real visibility outside of a certain niche market, these sneakers are already the latest item for fashion-forward hipsters in Sanlitun and Wudaoying. Marketed out of Hong Kong and with retail distribution arrangements in a host of Oceanic and European cities, Shulong is decidedly less retro than its predecessors, doing away with …

London, following in the footsteps of several North American cities (and some in the Netherlands), is being overrun by ceramic animals. Indian fiberglass elephants, to be precise. The white, richly decorated creatures have been “adopted” by a number of celebrities (from the logical artistic bunch including Kriti Arora and designers Isaac Mizrahi and Lulu Guinness, to the slightly more eccentric such as IPL leader, scandal-plagued Lalit Modi). The goal of this Elephant Parade campaign is to raise awareness and money of the plight of the Asian elephants (apparently they’re in danger of extinction). The elephants will be displayed until July, …