The One Thing I’ll Give Minions

Minions are the Teletubbies of our era—inescapable, relentlessly cheerful, and engineered to be stamped onto any available surface. Kevin, Bob, and Stuart graduated from franchise side characters to dominant consumer mascot of the mid-2010s, colonizing Tic Tacs, bedsheets, Monopoly boards, nail polish, and—I’m not making this up—glue sticks. Glue. Sticks. They replaced the Crazy Frogs and novelty bunnies of earlier years as symbols of a particular cultural surrender: we’ve accepted that everything will be branded with something idiotic, and we’re buying it anyway.

By the time someone at the fashion site Stylight thought to reimagine Karl Lagerfeld, Cara Delevingne, and Donatella Versace as the little yellow idiots, I’d already made my peace with hating all of it. Which made my actual reaction more annoying: the illustrations were genuinely good. Something about reducing Lagerfeld’s visual signature—the white ponytail, the fingerless gloves, the permanent expression of being slightly above everyone in the room—to a cylindrical, goggle-eyed drone hit exactly right. Versace in Minion form retained her bleached hair and her specific species of imperious glamour. Delevingne’s eyebrows translated into the format perfectly, because of course they did.

The concept only works when the subject has a strong enough visual identity to survive total reduction. These three do, which also says something about them: fashion icons who’ve turned themselves into walking logos are already a kind of Minion—symbols before they’re people, designed for reproduction and immediate recognition at maximum distance.

Changed nothing about the franchise. But they earned their moment.