Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Vintage Dixie cups: See retro designs & dispensers, plus get the history of the little disposable cups

80s cup design

Gina Ekiss began working at Sweetheart’s art department in 1987 along with a few dozen other artists. As Ekiss recalls, the company wasn’t thrilled with initial external submissions for a new pattern design, so they turned to their own in-house creatives. She started with charcoal on vellum, then scanned the results. Today, the very 1990s-style teal-and-purple Jazz design can be found on t-shirts, sandals, bumper stickers and other fan-made merchandise. Originally,  though, it was applied by the Sweetheart Cup Company to a series of plates, bowls and cups.

Emily Post for Dixie cups (

So, the company announced an internal design contest with the goal of finding a design that would print well and appeal to the masses. Ekiss was one of the few workers with computer design skills. When the company announced a cup design contest, she looked to an image she’d created in college and remade it digitally, scanning charcoal strokes made on vellum. The design's playful 1980's colors were a departure from the company's previous stock designs, which were much more serious. Yeah, you know what we're talking about -- that purple and turquoise pattern that hits you with giant pangs of nostalgia. The "Jazz" design began showing up on paper cups about 23 years ago.

80s cup design

Ways To Reuse Paper Cups

The chili should be properly heated by the time the dogs are done. Unfortunately for Orange and Yellow Flowers, time marches on, but what an incredible run it had. People were drinking their beverages out of this dazzling design for approximately two decades. Other designs would sprout up in the meantime that would try to replace it, but they would all hit up against this seemingly unstoppable masterpiece of product design. Jazz would come to dominate the paper cup scene, especially online, but two other cups have their share of fans that I wanted to mention. First is the New York City classic, the Anthora, “We are happy to serve you” coffee cup.

Vintage Dixie Cup dispensers were for families (

Gehman had noticed Oki-Dog before even stopping in at her friend’s suggestion. Gehman didn’t have a car at the time, so she would travel around West Hollywood on foot when she couldn’t get a ride. And Oki-Dog was on the route between several hot spots for punks.

While the actual inspiration is unclear — more on that later — the jazz cup design clearly matches the 90s design aesthetic with its vibrant color combinations and graffiti-like scribbles. Both aspects are characteristic of 90s maximalism, which embraces absurdity, loud color schemes, and conflicting patterns and textures. The company doesn't make them anymore, and wants to redesign them to be more modern should they release them again. "It just doesn't really fit out there anymore," a representative from the company that now owns the facility where the cups were made told Gounley.

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s Retro PNG, 80s Sublimation Design, Nostalgia Digital Download

The jazz cup design fits right in with 90s pop culture. Just look at the opening credits for popular TV shows from the era, like Saved by the Bell, Fresh Prince, and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. All of them feature funky and slightly chaotic animations full of zig zags and clashing patterns.

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These ideas were meant to stand out and leave their mark on the world. Cups don’t usually make history — but the 90s jazz cup just hit different. These days, Ekiss scratches her creative itch by burning Native American–inspired designs onto gourds. “I wanted to get more back into hands-on artwork,” she says.

Twenty restaurants served Festival-related fare for just one week. “They just got slammed because we didn’t have the festival—people didn’t have their Oki dog fix,” Tamashiro said. In 2004, Honolulu Star-Bulletin food critic Betty Shimabukuro wrote a story recounting how Sueyoshi’s Oki dog became a fixture of Honolulu’s annual Okinawan Festival. Two years ago, the Okinawan Festival sold more than 4,700 Oki dogs. To assemble, scoop up a one-third cup of chili and spread it out in a line along the lower third of the tortilla.

80s cup design

Retro drink names on Dixie Cups (

I am not sure what was so satisfying about it, but it took my mother about a decade to finally break me of this habit. But I am hungrily eyeing my current collection of waxed, so maybe the habit was not completely broken. I spent a lot of time trying to photograph and scan the cups under a proper light because I really wanted to get their color value. What I discovered is that, combined with the effects of aging, there was enough variation between cup types to make it challenging to identify the orange and yellow the cups are supposed to be.

Dart Container Corporation explained that most historical information has been lost, but their best assumption is that Gina is the original creator. You saw it in the hands of the field trip mom serving you a cup of warm Kool Aid. It showed up at a slumber party, in the guest bathroom rinse cup dispenser. And there it was again, casually held by a character on your favorite sitcom. Earlier this year, a Reddit post from lovers of the Jazz cup emerged. A reporter for the Springfield News-Leader, Thomas Gounley, found a break in the form of a tweet from Ekiss’s daughter.

The reporter only knew the designer's first name as well as the fact that she had worked for the Sweetheart Cup Company, which was later bought by Solo Cup Company. He eventually found a tweet from a person claiming to be the creator's daughter, according to his article. After looking through public records and coming across Ekiss' name and address, Gounley drove to her house and confirmed his suspicions.

Every spoonful of ice cream or dairy dessert in a Dixie cup is delicious — its quality and purity assured by a joint agreement between the Dixie Cup Company and the makers of your favorite ice cream. Mouth-to-mouth contagion from public drinking utensils can only be checked by sanitizing with intense beat or chemicals — and that takes time. Then the drug store soda fountain, under pressure to raise sanitation standards, began to use the paper “Health Kups,” as one of the advertising geniuses of the time named them.

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