Cup as teacher, cup as intent
Text is supposed to be a durable canon of wonder, or so the page says. One of the things I’ve strenuously tried to follow is no dunks, because on the internet the opposite of love is not to hate, it is to ignore. An expensive whiskey cup for whiskey men was not ignored. We’ll continue to discuss this now.
I sort of look at the cup with wonder? I mean this. I was upset about it, sure, but that’s because it’s upsetting. It is shocking, an aberration in the fabric of the universe in 2024. It is awe-inspiring, causing you to mouth “why” at the screen. It is a perfect indicator of income inequality, which is only getting worse over time. We exist in a world where pants cost $500 and sell out routinely. Our world also involves people buying cups en masse on websites that promise the ability to “shop like a billionaire,” which I guess to many people means buying a lot of stuff without worry, not $300 whiskey cups.
Between these poles is, say, this titanium masterpiece. When I ditch all of my possessions for multiple months and need a way to drink beverages on the road, I bring a larger version of this cup, tuck other stuff into it, and never think about it again. It is indestructible, lightweight, and can be handled with bare hands with boiling liquid in it. Its proportions are ideally pleasing, in my opinion, and it wears well. It also, unlike the whiskey cup, possesses a minimalist lack of artifice or character, which allows the object to grow alongside you without getting too much in your own way, aesthetically speaking.
I don’t think the whiskey cup was cheap to produce. Small batch, high refinement process, lots of R&D, weird extra blue bolt, etc. Oh, sure, they’re making money on it. But they’re not making Le Creuset money on it, whose markups remain so outrageous that an entire separate company exists to take market from them. The object is what it is. The price is the price.
I think often of the purpose of craft. Sometimes it’s to improve one’s quality of life, such as with durable furniture or performant kitchen gear. Sometimes it’s to speak to someone who wears suits a lot, and hence wants one that is likely to both work for them and status-signal as upper-class. Other times it’s just to make a rich person feel rich. You spend the $300 because you are rich, you want to show off that you are rich, and you don’t want to do so in a way that is broadly legible. This is quiet luxury: finding the object that nobody else knows but has the aura, favoring craft over brand.
No matter what, the price is the price. I own a jacket that most people would call “expensive”. I have used most features on that jacket, written about them in text, and think it’s one of the single biggest changes in my lifestyle that I’ve made in the past year. The maker of that jacket has stated that the jacket is expensive because it is expensive to produce. “The price is the price,” he says. “The whole thing is product-driven.” This brings about questions of intent, of performance, of the relationship between design & expense. Why make the thing what it is? What is the purpose behind doing so?