Blink and you’ll miss it: the hay day of AirPods may be coming to a close. In 2019, Vogue noted Bella Hadid’s love for wired headphones, however more recently, TikTok is providing a surge of wired headphone fanatics. Now, the accessory is being treated as a vintage statement piece — you are not just listening to music, you are actively showing the world you are.
It all harks back to Tumblr culture in the 2010s. Countless posts with countless reblogs would depict an iPhone of the time, listening to Arctic Monkeys’ AM, with wired headphones wrapped stylistically on someone’s duvet. Listening to music was as much a part of the 2010s grunge aesthetic as Doc Martens.
There is some backlash about it, as was the case with the 2019 Vogue article. Arguably, the celebrities sporting wired headphones could be wearing them because they were in a rush — but, if something is on our person whilst we are about, surely it makes it an accessory? The same could be said for changing phone cases to match outfits (a topic we discuss in Devon’s World.) Technology is so involved in our lives now, it has become a part of our outfits. Wearing wired headphones over wireless may sound silly, but it can be a lighthearted change to an outfit.
In an update to the original article, Satenstein remarks a certain ‘un-botheredness’ of Bella Hadid wearing wired over wireless. Maybe, in a world so surrounded by technology, going back to wired — something that, in 2021, feels ‘old-school’ — is a nice break from the digital.
Edited by Lucy Eaton