Sometime in the fall of 2021, I started wanting to photograph Starbucks cups. My hand, in a park, holding a Starbucks cup. My seat in a meeting: condensating Starbucks cup. The street corner where people in our building leave trashbags: stepped-on Starbucks cup. I had woken up one day (which day, I’m not sure) and Starbucks cups were cool accessories again, making every setting a little vignette to be photographed.

We all know the Internet—Instagram, specifically—trucks in shadowy microtrends. That green House of Sunny knit dress, hands with gold rings, zoomed-in pictures of ugly labels, frilly socks: these are the it-girls stock in trade. Sometimes, if the microtrends get big enough or if a journalist thinks up a cute name for them, these trending genres end up memorialized in media. Mostly, though, they spread like ground cover plants: just under the radar,  scrolling prettily past your nose until the cutting-edge influencers have moved on and the second- and third-tier folks start in on the trend. At that point, most of us have picked up on it—even if unconsciously—and the past-peak photos look sort of ho-hum and uninteresting, though we might not be able to put our fingers on why.

But I’ve gotten bogged down in the trend cycle! Back to the topic at hand: the Starbucks revival. After years of idling on the benches, being the hometown staple, the there’s-nothing-else-for-miles, the purveyor of pink drinks, loved by tweens and moms looking to “catch up,” the biggest name in coffee is . . . cool again? And it’s just the right breed of cool, too—it’s not just trendy, there’s something edgy about these mostly zoomed-in Starbucks shots. They’re tantalizingly post-ironic (because of course they are. In this economy? How could they be otherwise?)