In Other Words: Things That Look Like Other Things
In an age where the very foundations of categorical certainty have been systematically dismantled by poststructural inquiry, allow us – FemPowerGifts by GetBullish – to present a revolutionary assemblage of objects that dare to transgress the tyrannical boundaries of form and function while also making excellent birthday and holiday gifts.
This collection represents nothing less than a Foucauldian rupture in the episteme of everyday utility1—a bold interrogation of what Baudrillard termed the “precession of simulacra.”
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The Pancake Stack Mug: Breakfast as Epistemological Crisis
What appears to be breakfast reveals itself as beverage delivery system, forcing the user into a daily confrontation with phenomenological instability. As Derrida might suggest, the very concept of “mug” becomes différance2 incarnate—simultaneously present and absent, pancake and not-pancake, sustenance and vessel in endless deferral.
Cake Mug with Lid by Canna Style
In parallel semantic rebellion, a mug shaped like a cake destabilizes our understanding of celebratory consumption, while an alien landing vessel mug suggests that even extraterrestrial visitation can be domesticated through the ritual of hot beverage consumption.
Spacey Alien Mug and Plate Set by Canna Style
The Diet Coke Handbag: A Meditation on Consumer Consciousness
This exquisite vessel, meticulously crafted to mimic the iconic aluminum cylinder of late-capitalist refreshment, forces us to confront Magritte’s eternal question: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe“3—but here, applied to the realm of portable storage solutions.
As Foucault observed in The Order of Things, our systems of classification are merely contingent constructions of power. This handbag liberates us from the false binary of “container” versus “contained,” revealing the arbitrary nature of our taxonomic presumptions. One carries not merely personal effects, but the weight of ontological uncertainty itself.
Handheld Vintage Phone Wristlet by Comeco
Similarly, a purse shaped like a vintage 1990s phone transforms telecommunication nostalgia into portable storage, collapsing the temporal boundaries between analog connection and digital displacement. Ceci N’est Pas Un Téléphone, you might say. Or, to hark back to Derrida, the meaning of a vintage cell phone simulacrum changes constantly as smartphones evolve to look less and less like, well, this.
The Sardine Can Hair Claw: Follicular Archaeology and the Preservation of Being
Hair, as Sartre understood, represents our most intimate relationship with temporality—growing, dying, being cut and reformed in endless cycles of becoming.4 The sardine can hair claw transforms this daily ritual of follicular management into a meditation on preservation itself.
Velvet Claws Tinned Sardines Hair Clip
What once contained oceanic protein now restrains terrestrial keratin, creating what Heidegger might recognize as a moment of thrownness5—we are thrown into a world where fish containers become beauty implements, where the gulf between sea and scalp collapses into pure utility.
Velvet Claws Vintage Camera Hair Claw
The camera-shaped hair claw captures not images but hair itself, freezing movement in a gesture that recalls Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image6.
Benjamin also argued that the constant production of novelty within capitalism fundamentally alters our experience of the world as the “new” becomes a routine experience. You’d think this would be our fault, as a store, but it’s hard for us, too – if you’re not impressed by a hair claw shaped like a camera, what must we supply next? A hair claw shaped like time itself? Time itself shaped like a hair claw? Perhaps this will suffice:
Velvet Claws Stick of Butter Hair Claw
The stick of butter hair claw literalizes the metaphor of “buttery smooth” hair while questioning whether dairy products and beauty tools share some deeper ontological substrate.
One does not put butter in one’s hair; yet the shape of a stick of butter is suitable as the shape of a hair claw, thus prioritizing form over appearance, utility over simulacra.
The Lipstick Lighter: Cosmetic Pyromania and the Performance of Identity
Perhaps nowhere is Butler’s theory of performative identity7 more literally embodied than in this sublime object. Appearing to be an instrument of beauty enhancement, it reveals itself as a tool of combustion—a perfect metaphor for the way gender performance both conceals and ignites authentic being.
Red Lipstick Lighter by A Shop of Things
The user approaches their lips, expecting transformation through pigmentation, only to discover the potential for flame. Here, Baudrillard’s hyperreality achieves its apotheosis: the simulation (lipstick) precedes and ultimately displaces the real (lighter), creating what we might call a “cosmetic conflagration of meaning.”
Match Stick Lighter by A Shop of Things
Similarly, a lighter shaped like a lit match creates infinite recursive possibility—flame begetting flame in eternal return.
The hard seltzer can lighter bubbles with deceptive refreshment while harboring pyromaniacal potential.
Spiked Seltzer Lighter by Canna Style
Michel Foucault challenged the idea of universal classifications – concepts like “madness,” “crime,” or “cigarette lighter” are instead historically contingent social constructions, emerging from specific historical periods and the power relations within them. Whoever decides the categories of objects holds a form of power, shaping our understanding of the world around us. Can you light a fatty with a chocolate bar? Not until now; she who expands the definition of “chocolate bar” thus exercises a certain power.
Chocolate Bar Lighter by Canna Style
The teapot lighter suggests that even the most civilized rituals of afternoon service contain within them the seeds of conflagration.
The cowgirl boot lighter begins with a symbol of frontier pragmatism and the domination of the natural world and renders it pocket-size, cute, pink – seemingly defanged, and yet capable of producing flame in an instant.
Cowgirl Boot Lighter by Canna Style
If, as Butler wrote, gender is not innate, but rather a performance that we constantly enact and have reinforced through social interactions, then a pink cowgirl boot lighter could reify your gender performance in a real kicky manner.
The Fried Egg Ashtray: Breakfast Nihilism and the Residue of Consumption
The vessel that receives ash—the final residue of combusted desire—here masquererades as the sunny optimism of morning nourishment. This fried egg ashtray forces us to confront the cyclical nature of consumption and destruction that Bataille8 understood as the foundation of all economic exchange.
Fried Egg Ashtray by Canna Style
Bataille asserts that a society’s – and there is always excess – must be “destroyed” in luxuries, the arts, spectacles, sensual pleasures, etc. lest it catastrophically spill out, usually as war.
This cat-shaped ashtray domesticates the final resting place of tobacco’s destruction, while the dog ashtray suggests that even our most loyal companions must eventually accommodate our more destructive impulses.
Dachshund Ashtray by A Shop of Things
Bataille also remarks that in some cultures, especially ancient ones, the society’s abundance and excess spilled out in the form of human sacrifice. In other words, burn a jazz cigarette to stave off the desire to throw human beings into a volcano.
The pie ashtray completes the circle of consumptive irony—where sweetness becomes the receptacle for burned remains.
Each piece in this collection serves as a material manifestation of philosophical inquiry, transforming the mundane act of gift-giving into an exercise in radical phenomenology.
To own these objects is to participate in what Foucault called the “archaeology of knowledge”—but here, applied to the humble domestic sphere, where handbags masquerade as beverages and breakfast disguises itself as crockery.
Honorable Mentions:
Baguette Pen
Pasta Box Lighter
Toast Rug
- Foucault: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one épistémè that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” The hidden set of assumptions and rules particular to our epoch define what we are able to know or think; our episteme includes beliefs about what “is cake” and what “is not cake,” allowing for those beliefs to be ruptured by really weird cakes. ↩︎
- “Différance” (with an “a” and a little accent mark) is a neologism that combines “difference” and “deferral,” indicating that meaning is not fixed or inherent but rather “deferred,” emerging through a dynamic process of, well, difference from other terms you might compare the first term to. The meaning of male depends on female and one changes with the other over time; the meaning of mug is a little effed up by weird-ass mugs. ↩︎
- It’s a famous painting of a pipe, below which it says “This is not a pipe” in French (that part’s just because the guy was French). It’s about the nature of representation, but I mean … yes, a picture of a pipe is not an actual pipe that you can stuff tobacco in and smoke; does that really merit naming the painting The Treachery of Images? Who hurt you? In this case, the faux Coke can is holdable, but cannot be filled with liquid: it contains no Coke. Calling it “treachery” is a little strong, though. ↩︎
- When he got his first haircut as a child, his mother cried because he was so ugly. Hence, philosophy! https://memex.naughtons.org/ugliness-the-philosophical-dimension/11577/ ↩︎
- The concept that individuals are “thrown” into existence without choosing their circumstances, time, or place – the philosopher’s “I didn’t ask to be born, Mom!” ↩︎
- A specific moment in history, often triggered by an image or experience, that reveals the inherent contradictions and tensions within a given historical period and serves as the impetus for political consciousness. You cannot take such an image with a camera-shaped hair claw, but please don’t let that stymy your political consciousness. ↩︎
- Butler wrote that “gender proves to be performance— that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” In other words, the person performing a gender isn’t a pre-existing entity who then does the performance; rather, it is the performance itself that brings the gendered subject into being. It is a heady claim for an e-commerce store, but it is conceivable that this product could in fact cause you to exist. ↩︎
- The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy is a 1949 book about political economy that suggests that luxury, the arts, and “non-procreative sexuality” can prevent war; it makes sense that this book is French. ↩︎
