Stanley Cups Have Streetwear Hype — But Are They Streetwear?
The ultra-viral Stanley cup has been enjoying some wild TikTok hype for the past few months especially. You could even say that the buzz is reaching the level of streetwear drops but Stanley is not a streetwear brand. Yet.
Stanley's leveling up its collaboration game, evolving from Starbucks and Target to Japanese streetwear brand fragment design, helmed by the ultra-well-connected Hiroshi Fujiwara.
The release of any new Stanley cup collab is often as big as any streetwear drop — now, the Stanley cup is actually entering the streetwear space. Kind of.
But this really only makes Stanley one Supreme collab away from achieving actual streetwear bonafides.
Founded in the early ‘90s by Hiroshi Fujiwara, fragment design has since become the defacto collaborator for fashion’s biggest names seeking streetwear clout.
Stanley is just as storied, having existed for over a century as the go-to thermos for workers and schoolkids alike.
While there are likely five iterations of the classic Stanley water bottle or thermos sitting in suburban garages around the world, a new iteration of Stanley's reusable water bottle recently went viral as "the Stanley cup," with newfound fans of all ages latching onto the tumbler's simplicity and quality.
This fragment design collab is officially Stanley's strongest stab yet at achieving some level of quantifiable cool.
Launching March 15 on Stanley's Japanese web store and at Dover Street Market Ginza, the fragment x Stanley collab consists of large and small Stanley vacuum bottles, growlers and flasks.
They all come in an updated shade of the army green in reference to some of the original Stanley cup designs and even wear the same textured metal as the classics. They’re co-branded as you'd expect: fragment's lightning bolt logo, Stanley branding, and “Established 1913.”
It might take more than a Fragment collab to make the back-to-basics aesthetic of the Stanley cup to make this new merch hit with the streetwear heads but, then again, it might also go over the heads of the average Stanley fan.
You definitely won’t have to battle anyone in a Target to get one of these things.
You just have to, you know, go to Japan — honestly, that might be less of a hassle all around.
