The Libbey Glassware Co. in the US was responsible for some of the most perfect drinking vessels in history, but they also made a few... well we might charitably call them ‘questionable design decisions’.
This is the ‘Bravura’ which was popular in the ‘80s. It took me a while to track a couple down and I can honestly say it is one of the most disturbing objects I’ve encountered in this project.
That stem is curves for no practical reason at all, apart, maybe, from swerving the place where your fingers naturally want the stem to be. A queasy bait-and-switch. There’s a temptation to seize the curve like the handle of a tea mug... which half works... but also shoots your drink up your arm. You either have to hold it close to the rim - the way you’re never supposed to hold a glass - or you kind of ‘cup’ your fingers, suggestively under and around the bowl. You know... so you can really get things up to whatever room temperature is in a sweaty singles bar, with maximum efficiency.
This being the 80’s they also made a double bowled ‘Margarita’ version which has the distinction of looking like a diseased udder. It wouldn’t get past the algorithm if I shot it.
I think they made some with clear stems which were probably the least egregious, but they also did them in ‘amber’, ‘ruby’, ‘aqua’ and this ‘cobalt’.
It’s rare that design can actually effect your emotions quite so negatively. No matter what you pour into it, this glass expresses a combination of despair and desperation.
Last night I finally got to watch Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia’, which has almost certainly warped my perceptions a bit... but so much of his mise-en-scene telegraphs a cokey, edge-of-sanity, riskiness. Some terrific shots of bars, TV studios and shop interiors where everything is teetering on the edge of, not just ‘kicking off’, but detonating. I’m not sure if it’s just association or something inherent in the design of the period but this glass has it in spades. It’s the kind of glass a spiked drink comes in. It requires Michael Mann lighting. It can only be grasped with a hairy-backed hand with rings, a heavy bangle and a linen jacket sleeve pushed up. Or a hand full of crimson false talons. Certainly problematic attitudes around consent.
I’m not sure Henry Gibson drinks from a Bravura in the bar scene, I’ll have to go back and check. But I know Tom Cruise would have.
Perhaps that’s what the colour is for. A cocktail should say “drink me”. In a cobalt ‘Bravura’ it says “If you’re feeling like this... you probably shouldn’t”.