I miss the extra Apple indulgences that used to come when you purchased a new phone. There was a sense of ceremony in unwrapping a new charger and some fresh wired headphones. As someone who now wears Bluetooth-enabled AirPods daily, I sometimes miss those bonus accessories. Having that backup felt like a nice luxury.
It's been some time since Apple stopped adding these extras to iPhone boxes, but their absence feels freshly relevant as wired headphones stage something of renaissance. Once considered a tech relic, the wired headphone has become a bit of a cultural statement. It was about practicality, but has since become more of a personality trait.
Wireless Bluetooth headphones have been around for nearly a decade now – a symbol of innovation when they first emerged. Today, they’re everywhere. Seen most on TikTok, where trends reflect a growing fascination with imperfection and tactility. But that same nostalgia seems to be rippling through the zeitgeist at large. In fact, nostalgia might just be the trendiest thing out there. Fashion has already gone through Y2K maximalism, indie sleaze, and Tumblr-era, but now tech is following the same wash-and-rewear pattern.
You’ve probably noticed it too – wired headphones are everywhere. Over the past year especially, they’ve reemerged across fashion and media. Jacob Elordi has been spotted on coffee runs in Paris with his wired headphones, while Addison Rae wears hers in her music video Headphones On. Fashion IT-girls like Bella Hadid and Zoë Kravitz have both been photographed in their off-duty street style. Even Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first campaign for Balenciaga leaned into the look, featuring model Mona Tougaard wearing wired headphones as she lay in bed – the campaign was a visual embodiment of effortless utility and refined allure.
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When you analyse celebrity style – in an age where most have stylists – their choices are filtered through PR teams and ultimately designed to sustain a narrative. Street style becomes simply an extension of that performance. For the likes of Bella Hadid and Lily-Rose Depp — the reigning cool girls — that narrative often reads as low-effort; a carefully constructed kind of anti-luxury.
The decision to wear a $29 pair of wired headphones instead of a $249 wireless pair feels less like convenience and more like intent. A fashion statement disguised as nonchalance; a new way to signal distinction, where today, luxury itself, has become too common.
Whether chosen without a thought or a deliberate style statement, there's undeniably a cultural tension to the rise of relics like wired headphones. A costume of sincerity, you could call it. The performance of not performing. Jacob Elordi’s offhand remark when asked about being performative – “I think people need to get out more maybe” – could just as easily describe a longing for something unfiltered in an overly-curated world. In a society where everyone is searching for individuality, even rebellion can become can become another trend.
A costume of sincerity, you could call it. The performance of not performing.
Sociologists call it conspicuous anti-consumption, or the inverse of flaunting wealth. The way celebrities wear thrifted T-shirts with couture skirts, or wired headphones paired inconspicuously with a Bottega Veneta Andiamo bag. It's a visual shorthand for being both above and outside the mainstream.
But I think you could also view this shift as an itch for reconnection and authenticity. Technology and the surge of generative AI is fusing reality and simulation. This new technology has indeed given us unprecedented innovations, capabilities and connection, but ironically it's also introduced distance. A reality where people update an app before they can use their toothbrush, have their "smart fridge" write a grocery list, find kinship in internet forums over the real world, and talk out their problems to ChatGPT rather than a friend.
Sometimes progress distances us from what's real and reliable; and the return of the wired headphones might subtly represent a yearn for literal, real-world, tangible connection. While Bluetooth headphones promise the freedom of no strings attached, the concept is tangled with dependencies of charging, pairing, ecosystems and battery life. Where a wired headphone might limit you physically, it gives you that dependable control. I could almost say in all of this, paradoxically, that in its constraint lies a kind of freedom.
Sometimes progress distances us from what's real and reliable; and the return of the wired headphones might subtly represent a yearn for literal, real-world, tangible connection.
Over seven years of using AirPods myself, I am constantly losing them, dropping them, and have spent an annoying amount of time looking for and charging them. And so I've started to miss the ritual and intimacy of the wire. The soft pull against your jacket, the little knot you untangle before listening. It forces you to pause and take a moment, that you could say tech keeps trying to erase. So when I see people, even celebrities, wearing them I get it a bit more now. I’ll still keep using my AirPods (until I lose one, again), but maybe next time I’ll reach for the wired ones instead.
