There are jaguars that can bite through turtle shells and strongmen who can lift cars into the sky, but nothing on Earth is as powerful as you trotting down the street with a coffee in hand. Admit it, you know the feeling: a takeaway cup in one hand, a phone in the other, striding, swerving, sipping, could it be that you’re literally unstoppable? If a man dares look at me while I’m holding one, he’ll burst into flames. If I get a scary business call, I will not be scared. Is there an Olympic medal for dodging other pedestrians? Surely I have won it.
This is a sentiment you could never admit at a party, but it does crop up online. A single TikTok video about walking around with coffee can accumulate 900,000 views; users on the site ask questions like, ‘What is it about picking up a stupid little coffee on a stupid little walk that just gives me a little pep in my step? It does something to my soul.’ It’s not news that reusable cups are status symbols – why else did Vogue and Balenciaga release an £85 porcelain version this summer? But it seems that ordinary paper and plastic cups are also associated with looking and feeling good. Why?
It could be down to Chris Gorley. From 1997 to 2008, she worked as a product placement specialist at Starbucks, negotiating deals with film execs. ‘We want to reinforce the brand as part of people’s daily lives,’ she said in 2003.
Think of an iconic late ’90s or early ’00s romcom and you can undoubtedly picture a Starbucks cup. Meg Ryan grabbed one in the opening of 1998’s You’ve Got Mail; Sandra Bullock placed a big coffee order two years later in Miss Congeniality. The devil may have worn Prada but she also drank Starbucks.
In 2011, Florida University’s Xiaochen Zhang analysed Starbucks product place- ment in seven movies and found its cups were mostly carried by white middle-class women aged 20 to 50. Plus, 54% of the time, the brand featured in workplace scenes. Zhang noted Starbucks was drunk by busy fashion magazine editors, art gallery assistants, columnists, FBI officers and bookstore owners in these films, and thus, ‘The cup of Starbucks coffee in hand is not just a beverage but also a token of their aspirational dreams.’
But did this actually impact us? ‘When I envision powerful women, I think about The Devil Wears Prada and Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, which have iconic scenes where somebody is running through New York City with a cup of coffee,’ says 25-year-old LA-based Mia Lind. She is the creator of the viral Hot Girl Walk, a movement that seeks to encourage mindful walking (and a registered trademark!). ‘There is something in the aesthetic of bringing an iced coffee on a walk,’ she says. ‘In America, coffee culture represents productivity, and productivity equals power.’
Lind now has over 112,000 followers on TikTok, meaning she herself now reinforces hese messages when posing with coffee. Unsurprisingly, influencers influence us. In August 2021, Waitrose reported a 75% surge in iced coffee sales after the beverage was featured regularly on Love Island. Former contestant Dani Dyer recently did an Instagram advert for Blank Street Coffee, posing outside one of its stores with a drink. Stars also promote these ideas for free. This year alone, Love Island’s Molly- Mae Hague has posted 21 images of herself with coffee to her Instagram main feed – coffee features in 9% of her posts.
‘There’s this lovely “cultivation theory”,’ says Elizabeth Cohen, associate professor at West Virginia University who studies the psychological impact of popular culture. ‘It argues that, over time, all of the images that we see on TV can start to shape our view of the world.’ For example, most of us could describe what it’s like to testify in court even if we’ve never set foot in one – because we’ve been exposed to thousands of court- room scenes on TV. ‘Heavy consumption of film and TV can influence how we associate different trends and behaviours with social status,’ she says.
So, for decades we’ve associated takeaway coffee with aspirational (if sometimes harried) women – but on top of that, we can’t overlook coffee’s inherent psychological effects. Valerio Manippa is a researcher at the University of Bari who recently wrote a paper on coffee’s impact on mood. He explains that caffeine blocks adenosine, a neurotransmitter linked to relaxation and tiredness, and by doing so it indirectly increases dopamine activity. ‘Dopamine plays a key role in boosting our mood, motivation and even self-confidence,’ he says, ‘contributing to the sense of power we feel when energised by coffee.’
The trouble with all of this is that what feels good might not actually be good. We can’t settle for the aesthetics of power instead of its actuality. There are ‘associations’, Cohen says, ‘that a capitalist system leads us to draw between having a product, such as coffee, and satisfying some sort of basic psychological need, such as social belong- ing or competence. But I don’t think coffee, or any pop culture trend, can really give us what we need, psychologically, as humans.’