The Return of Wires
From bringing back older trends such as middle parts or Crocs, to exiling other ones like skinny jeans, Gen-Z has a mind of its own. It is nearly impossible to keep up with what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’. The latest trend: traditional wired headphones. Well-known celebrities such as Bella Hadid and Lily-Rose Depp have been spotted wearing them and now many are following in their footsteps, rebranding wired headphones as a vintage accessory. In the past five years, if you were caught with wires on your headphones instead of Apple's “Airpods”, you would have been labelled outdated, or uncool. Now that all of the ‘it’ girls are rocking wires, they have been rebranded as cool. For example, @wireditgirls have even gone to lengths to make an Instagram account of people wearing the wires!
Looking back on my days of wearing wired headphones, all I remember is them getting tangled into huge knots and twisted all around me. Although I do not have that problem with Airpods, a new problem has arisen. AirPods have become too widespread to be cool. Even luxury fashion brands, such as Louis Vuitton, have their own version of Airpods. Now that Airpods are more widespread and there are more Airpod-like products being made, trendsetters are reviving some ‘ancient technology’.
Airpods started off as a status symbol for early adapters, but quickly became an essential fashion item and utility. AirPods have become somewhat democratized and now younger generations find them to be uncool. We have seen this cycle of a trend happen time and time again with other technologies. For example, five years ago Facebook used to be all the craze, and now it serves a much older demographic. Once something becomes mainstream, some people tend to look for another new thing to replace it. The best example for this is skinny jeans! After bell bottom jeans became mainstream, skinny jeans came into the picture. Now young people have deemed skinny jeans “uncool”. In this case, they chose to revert back to flared bottoms, and retro technologies have become prominent accessories again.
Gen-Z is also known to follow trends set by influencers. In recent months, dozens of videos have sprung up on social media calling wired headphones "vintage" or "retro," garnering tens of thousands of reactions. Many influencers have also been using wired headphones in their videos such as @wireditgirls. This account launched in October and has a carefully curated page that features celebrities, such as Megan Fox and Jennifer Lawrence sporting wired headphones. The statement that the account is making is clear: Forget wireless, retro-tech is all the rage. These headphones are a different kind of fashion statement than they were five years ago, now representing nostalgia for a time that was simple, yet complicated aesthetically, instead of super sleek modern technology. There is now a clear point of rebellion against the modern wireless world, making maximalism cool versus minimalism. Thus, the wires contribute to the maximalist look that people are now going for.
At the end of the day, wired earbuds are making a comeback because of a predictably rebellious Gen-Z. A trend is just a trend: they are a snapshot in time and in a few months, when the next generation AirPods come out, they could be in every “it” person’s ears again.
