India, Dec. 6 -- Last month, a full-blown brawl broke out at a Texas Starbucks, with cops having to intervene. What was everyone fighting over? A limited-edition, teddy-bear-shaped cup, with a tiny green woolly cap for a lid. The Bearista Cold Cup is cute, no doubt. But throwing punches over coffee cups is such a 2025 moment. We've started emotionally bonding with chonky Stanley flasks. We're flexing our matcha and smoothie habits with see-through, Insta-friendly glass tumblers with bamboo lids and glass straws. Those of us who stick to old-fashioned coffee tote it around in a chic travel mug. So, wait. Is the coffee cup the new designer handbag? We've been building up to this. All through the 2010s, being seen with a Starbucks cup in the US signified that you were cool and busy, performative but not-full-hipster. Britney Spears and Taylor Swift paraded theirs for the paparazzi - logo facing outward. Dunkin' Donuts had its own cultural moment in 2020, when Ben Affleck stumbled around, post-divorce, with enough iced coffee to caffeinate a small village. Ex-wife Jennifer Lopez, on the other hand, chose a bedazzled "bling sipper" to match her shimmery concert outfits. Then, the pandemic hit and the drinks-verse blew up. Athleisure included matching sippers. Watertok (TikTok's hydration rabbit-hole) and wellness influencers anointed the Stanley Cup (a workingman's flask, really) as the must-have accessory. Plus, we collectively entered our sustainability era, obviously our beverage cups had to be reusable and consciously chosen as well. Think about recent activewear-hydration crossovers: Lululemon x S'well, Nike x Takeya, Athleta x Hydro Flask, and Stanley x CALIA. In 2019, Prada debuted a water bottle. In 2020, Maggie Rogers walked the Grammy's red carpet with a reusable bottle from Chanel. In the upcoming The Devil Wears Prada 2, Runway editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) will be seen carrying a Collina Strada rhinestone-covered water bottle. The attention is the point. You don't accessorise your pressure cooker. You don't decorate your gas cylinder. But a smoothie? That's what people are looking at. There's a pecking order already. Owala, Yeti and Stanley have more fashion cred than a no-name plastic glass with unicorn glitter and a bendy straw. And a limited-edition Starbucks mug - it's worth a fight, we're realising. Let's not pretend we're only doing this for the environment. The multiple drops and collabs will end up in landfills the moment the trend wanes. It's not about the drinks either. We're already starting to admit that matcha tastes like grass. We got over kombucha pretty quick. We realised that alkaline water is just water with a better publicist. The drinkable handbags signal something else. Matcha equals clean-girl minimalism. A transparent smoothie cup with a metal straw belongs to someone who wants to talk about gut health and can afford to spend Rs.600 on blended fruit every day. The insulated thermocup signals busy-chic. A bedazzled sipper is main-character energy personified. Limited collabs mean you're in the know. And spending money and effort on your carrying cup means, on some level, that you care how you're perceived. Your cup is actually a trophy for existing, even if you've awarded it to yourself....