I am, more than is usual, a hater. I don’t like most things that others do. It takes me a while to warm up to what mass culture considers important and exciting, and I’m often baffled by the ways people enjoy things like Taylor Swift’s music and Netflix shows. This isn’t because I think I’m better or more interesting than the mainstream, but because life is short, and I don’t want to spend it listening to a billionaire sing about their pet cats and such.
But I’m also fickle, and for a long time, I struggled to understand how a stainless steel and vacuum-insulated jug from a 110-year-old outdoors firm became a status symbol. That is until I raised a Stanley cup and took my first sip from its Flowstate™ straw. I had, of course, seen the TikTok videos. The ones where hundreds of suburbanites camped outside strip-lit Targets in middle-America, desperate to get their hands on limited-edition bottles, arranging them into a rainbow wall of trophies at home, and demonstrating all the flavored powders you can put inside them to trick the mind into doing something as natural as drinking water. (The alternative is – and bear with me on this – that you could drink from a traditional glass as and when your body sends thirst signals.)
The rush, speed, and compulsion with which people would stockpile these aesthetically challenging flasks represented, to me, the worst aspects of online consumerism: an unquenchable thirst for more stuff and things. The fact that you can now purchase an entire suite of drop-shipped accessories – backpacks, snack rings, charms, and phone holders – to decorate these already cumbersome vessels makes it all the worse. But then something shifted: an unmarked package landed on my desk. Inside it was a massive blue travel mug – Stanley’s Iceflow™ Flip Straw Tumbler – concealed in honeycomb wrapping. I wondered if it was a prank, or a false gift from someone I had previously upset with my writing. Because the only time I had ever referenced the product was within this article months beforehand, in which I seem to have used Gigi Hadid’s Miu Miu Arcadie handbag as an excuse to write a screed on the craze and insult the people naive enough to participate in it. (Stanleys cannot be an eco-alternative to single-use plastic when you collect hundreds of them; Stanleys will not help you reach health and hydration when you are piling them with radioactive sweeteners; Stanleys cannot be fashionable when they are overwhelmingly popular among Republican mum influencers.) No publicist would want to endorse that kind of message, and so I’m still unsure how one ended up in my possession.
I am delighted it did. I suppose I was generally grateful to receive a present, and I began to parade the bottle around the office with a sense of ironic detachment. I smiled knowingly when my colleagues said, “But, Daniel, that’s so not you!”, and yet this precious, Croc-colored thermos has since become the most earnest thing about me. It feels good to nurse on a giant sippy cup in a corporate environment – a self-soothing mechanism that I’m sure Freud would connect to some sort of parental wound healing after decades of infection – while the sheer weight and size of the thing makes me feel delicate, babied. And when I venture into the kitchen with my hands wrapped around that robust handle, I feel like one of my Celtic ancestors hauling buckets from a communal well. The stream is smooth, the contents cool. (There have been reports of Stanleys surviving fires, the ice cubes still clinking inside despite the flames.)
But more than that, I have learned, through constant use and trips to the toilet, that it is possible for things to be so un-chic that they become chic. That taste exists on a horseshoe. It starts with the unfashionable, the unassuming, the practical, and ends with the unexpected appeal of a simple, sturdy, and surprisingly stylish water bottle. Who knew that the epitome of practicality could become a symbol of something more? It seems that even a hater like me can be won over by a good Stanley cup.
