Wearable Tech Is Back In Fashion — Minus the Tech
You can’t even listen to music on Louis Vuitton's $1,850 Music Player bag. The gold-colored headphones? They’re just a decoration. The digital iPod screen? Yeah, that’s a “faux screen proposing a LV dashboard,” according to LV itself.
The entire thing is made in the name of nostalgia, not playing music. And so are the new Louis Vuitton Music Key Holder and the Tape Card Holder. They're all made to look like music players from the past.
LV's nostalgia-inducing accessories are very now, though. In an age where the average screen time almost equals the average length of a workday and the word of the year describes how the internet melts minds, old and limited tech looks quite attractive by comparison.
A style-savvy rise in old-fashioned flip phones, wired headphones, and vinyl records signifies that this sort of anti-tech is indeed in fashion.
Louis Vuitton obviously isn’t suggesting you abandon your smartphone in favor of a music-playing bag. It’s only suggesting that you look as though you did. Its faux tech tchotchkes are merely a visual throwback to pre-smartphone times.
The opposite is true of Coperni’s Tamagotchi bag, revealed earlier this year
Coperni’s Tamagotchi Swipe Bag features a fully usable piece of antiquated tech: a Tamagotchi! Yes, those portable pet gizmos that '00s kids will remember feeding until they inevitably died a digital death.
The single, only, totally minor downside to Coperni's Tamagotchi bag is that, well, it's not usable as a bag. The only thing the Tamagotchi bag holds is the Tamagotchi. Same goes for Coperni's 3D-printed Walkman-inspired Swipe Bag from a few years back.
It does play CDs. It does not carry everyday essentials.
These one-off bags, more mood piece than marketable accessory, set a tone. They're pedestaling bygone functionality, at the expense of actual utility. I mean, who even has CDs anymore? But that's the thing: As with everything with fashion, looks are everything. Substance, not so much.
There are modern cases that approach a middle ground, like the Slawn-affiliated streetwear label hillllslide's Bluetooth-enabled jacket, it both plays music and resists rain. It's also still very much a throwback to a 2006 Burton jacket, down to the built-in speakers.
Still, in an age of sleek wireless earbuds, a tinny speaker attached to the hood of a jacket is rendered redundant.
Same for Playboi Carti's Pelle Pelle jacket: It looks cool but, really, how useful are speaker-fitted jackets? Are they actually comfortable? Can broken parts be replaced without tearing up the garment?
These jackets may be more functional than Coperni and LV's innovations but they all speak to a greater wave of outdated tech reborn as ironically cool statement pieces.
We've seen this with wired headphones emerging as a knowingly unstylish alternative to wireless earbuds. Sure, they get tangled. Yes, they're tangibly impractical, demanding that the wearer always be tethered to their device. Oh, and how many people even have iPhones with headphone jacks?
But that level of untrendy specificity is part of the appeal. In fact, you could argue that it is the appeal, like refurbished tech company Back Market did last year.
Convenience isn't cool. Convenience is, by definition, easy. A challenge, well, that's a point of pride.
Especially in a world of brain implants and horrifyingly swift artificial intelligence developments, returning to the only semi-user-friendly era of scroll wheels and snarled cables feels comfortingly clunky. From a Y2K perspective, they're retro-cool. From a societal one, they're reassuringly lame. From a fashion POV, they're surprisingly stylish.
