Words by Robert Ito.
Everybody needs water, and reusable water bottles are as good a way as any to tote a bit of it around. Kids take them, snug in their backpack pockets, to school; grown-ups bring them to yoga classes; adventurers lug them up mountains. But water bottles have moved far beyond their purely practical use as simple hydration devices. Fashion models display designer versions on runways, while the rest of us festoon our Nalgenes and Hydro Flasks with stickers advertising the names of towns we’ve been to and bands we love. One can find water bottles that look like penguins, or bowling pins, or soccer balls. So how did these relatively simple containers—some with spouts or screw tops, others insulated with double-walled steel—become such powerful signifiers of who we are and what we believe in?
“A reusable water bottle says
‘I don’t drink the bottled stuff.
I have a conscience.'”
A big reason they say so much about us is because of what they’re not. They’re not disposable water bottles, the sort that litter our shores, or end up in the guts of whales and sea turtles in the form of microplastics.1 When you take the time to fill your Hydro Flask or Yeti or Nalgene out of a home tap, you’re telling others: I’m not the sort of person who junks up the environment willy-nilly. I’m the sort of person who cares deeply about a whale’s guts. I care so much, in fact, that I’m willing to schlep this bulky water bottle everywhere I go.
“A lot of it has to do with signaling,” says Richard Wilk, professor emeritus of anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington, who has written extensively about the history of water bottles. “If I see someone eating a hamburger, I know they eat meat. But if I see someone eating a salad, I don’t know if they eat meat or not. It’s very hard to show people what you don’t consume. But a reusable water bottle says ‘I don’t drink the bottled stuff. I have a conscience.’”
“It’s so rare that we can signal what we don’t do,” he says, “that it has an extra power attached to it.” Water bottles also let people know you’re someone who embraces an active lifestyle, and maybe even loves the great outdoors, whether or not you ever get out into it. If you’re on a walk in your neighborhood with your Hydro Flask, you could theoretically keep walking and walking until you reach some sort of wilderness area, and you’d be set. A direct descendant of the canteen and the goat-skin bag, the modern water bottle was initially created for adventurers to do just that: carry water to distant and exotic places where there might not be any available. That sporty heritage still clings to them today, even for suburban slugs who are using them just to haul water to, say, the mall.
Of course, there’s adventurous, and then there’s adventure-ish. According to Sam Schild, an outdoor adventurer and co-writer of Wirecutter’s “8 Best Water Bottles of 2023,” not all water bottles have the same rugged cachet.2 Hydro Flasks, he says, are for people who “like doing outdoorsy stuff, but they probably are urbanites. They spend most of their time in the city, but they’re always dressed like they could go on a hike at any moment.” Nalgenes, on the other hand, are the bottle of choice for “that traditional outdoorsy person who maybe actually lives in a mountain town, or spends a ton of time outside. They’re rock climbers, or backpackers. They’re way more concerned with durability than anything else.”3
As for Yetis, he says, they’re for folks who have a “really, really nice Toyota truck, and they drive to a campsite for the weekend. They have all these toys, a mountain bike, a $5,000 rooftop tent, so they have to have a really nice matching Yeti water bottle, too.”
Water bottles are also a great way to show that you care about your own health, separate from the general health of the planet. You’re a person who hydrates. For decades now, we’ve been told that we should drink eight glasses of water a day to keep our joints lubricated and our internal organs functioning. Even as questions arose about how that magical eight-glass figure came to be, the message stuck: Drink lots of water!4 People have bought into this so completely that there are now so-called motivational water bottles—giant, comically unwieldy jugs that hold a gallon of water each. The idea is to drink the contents of the entire jug in a day; line markers at one or two hour increments, along with encouraging messages, tell you if you’re hitting your goals (“3 p.m. Feeling Awesome,” “5 p.m. Don’t Give Up,” and so on). “That seems extremely gimmicky to me,” says Schild. “But it’s clever marketing.”
“If you had asked me 20 years
ago where I thought water bottles
were gonna go, I would have said,
‘I don’t know. Nowhere?’”
Connie Pechmann, a professor of marketing at the University of California at Irvine, sees the enormous bottles as something of an inevitability, given how long water bottles have been around and how popular they continue to be.5 “At this point in the life cycle of a product, people are trying different ideas, different segments, trying to keep things interesting,” she says. “Water bottles aren’t going to grow organically any more, because they’re established products. So in order to get any growth, you have to come up with different ideas, most of which will fail.”
Among the more dubious ideas are high fashion bottles, including those marketed by style houses like Prada ($160) and Chanel (around $5,000, complete with lambskin holder). Designer bottles by Balenciaga and Givenchy have shown up on runways and in photo shoots, often secured in their own equally stylish holders and shoulder bags. “I don’t think that’s a core market,” says Pechmann. “But it makes sense that if the people who buy your brands are using water bottles, why not make a water bottle that matches your clothes?”
One reason why you might not want to, of course, is that the very idea of water bottles as fashion, something that constantly changes with the seasons, is antithetical to why water bottles were created in the first place. “If you’re getting water bottles to match your outfits, and the colors change every year, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of sustainability,” Pechmann says. And in terms of functionality or durability, says Schild, you’re not getting anything appreciably better once your water bottle goes over, say, $50.6
Even if high fashion bottles eventually fade away, however, water bottles themselves aren’t going anywhere. Humans are always going to need water, and every year, there are new and different models vying for a fickle public’s attention: ones that filter your water or clean themselves or light up to remind you to drink. “If you had asked me 20 years ago where I thought water bottles were gonna go, I would have said, ‘I don’t know. Nowhere?’” says Schild. “ It’s just a thing that holds water. It’s mind-blowing, actually, how popular they are.”
