Objects of Power: The Stanley Cup, the Matching Gym Set, and the Crime of Wanting to Belong

In January 2024, police in Roseville, California, pulled over a 23-year-old woman. Law enforcement ended up finding 65 Stanley products in her car, giving a worth of about $2,500. She was charged with grand theft. The object at the center of the case was not a painting or an antique. It was a 40-ounce insulated cup that retails for around $45 (NPR).

It’s easy to chuckle at this story, and the police department’s own statement basically did. However, I think it’s worth asking a more serious question: how does a water cup become valuable enough to steal by the cartload? My answer is that the Stanley isn’t really a cup. It’s an aesthetic object. Aesthetic objects carry power.

Selling the self:

In my Honors class, Art and Crime, we watched Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self, which follows Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the man often called the father of public relations. Bernays figured out that you don’t sell people a product. You sell them a feeling about who they’ll be once they own it. His most famous stunt, in 1929, had young women light Lucky Strike cigarettes during New York’s Easter Parade and call them “torches of freedom.” A cigarette became a symbol of women’s independence, and the tobacco company paid for the entire thing.

Nearly a century later, the societal playbook hasn’t changed much. A Hydro Flask covered in “save the turtles” stickers was the uniform of the 2019 VSCO girl. The Stanley took over during the pandemic through TikTok’s “clean girl” aesthetic. This consisted of a slicked-back bun, a pilates class to attend, a matching neutral gym set, and a cute cup in hand. Nobody needed a new water bottle. What was being sold was membership and a lifestyle in a look.

Graphic design is art that works for someone:

One distinction from my class discussion stuck with me: fine art is framed as lofty self-expression, while graphic design is commissioned. It exists because someone needs it to do a job. That makes design the more honest place to study how art operates in society, because its purpose is out in the open. The muted “Rose Quartz” tumbler and the seamless beige gym set are designed objects. Their minimalism is not a lack of message. It is the message, carefully built to read as calm, disciplined, healthy, and put-together.

We also talked about the difference between amuse (to distract) and muse (to meditate). Brand aesthetics depend on amusement. They want us to absorb the image quickly and scroll on. They don’t want us to stop and think about why a cup’s color matters to us. The point of looking at these objects critically, the way we’d look at a museum piece, is to switch from amusing to musing.

Watching each other:

Museums were originally sold as spaces for the whole public, but part of their power, as, again, my class discussed, is a kind of reversed panopticon. Instead of a single guard watching prisoners, the crowd watches the objects and each other, and everyone learns how to behave by being seen. Aesthetic trends work the same way in public space. The gym, the campus walkway, and the TikTok feed are all places where people look at each other’s cups, workout sets, and shoes and quietly adjust. Nobody has to enforce the uniform. We enforce it on ourselves.

This is where the connection to crime gets real. Sociologist Albert Cohen’s status frustration theory argues that when people can’t earn respect through approved routes, some find other ways to get it. Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin added that illegitimate routes to success open up when the legitimate ones are blocked (Nickerson, Simply Psychology). Cohen was writing about working-class boys in the 1950s, not tumbler shoppers, but the logic stretches further than you’d expect. Carrying the right cup signals that you belong. Carrying the $12 “dupe” signals you are trying to. When the legitimate path to that status is priced out of reach or sold out, most people shrug it off, but a few take another route, like shoplifting a cart of tumblers. Meanwhile, resellers listing limited colors for several times the price show just how much status one cup is carrying.

Why it matters:

An earlier ACA post, “Less Is More: Why Minimalism Is for the Wealthy,” argued that the minimalist look is expensive to maintain. I agree, but I think the bigger issue is not the price tag. It’s the persuasion. Bernays understood that if you attach an object to identity, people will line up overnight for it, fight over it, and in rare cases steal it. The Roseville case is extreme, but the desire behind it is ordinary. Most of us have bought something because of what it would say about us.

The Stanley cup is obviously a small, silly object. That’s exactly what makes it a good one to study. It shows how design, media, and public space can turn an everyday item into an object of power, and how the line between wanting to belong and breaking the law can get thinner than we’d like to admit. So, my question for readers is: what’s the “Stanley” in your own life, the object you own mostly for what it says about you?