I recently interviewed an actress whose battered old phone case was even more rank than mine; a grey rubber affair less A-list than Accenture. ‘I have a crappy phone case too!’ I trilled, brandishing my £7.99 one with its blurry print of rainbow-coloured sprinkles. Sometimes, it feels as though I’m the only person in London whose phone case is a basic b*tch. Even the whey-faced teenager on the tube was toting a Selfridges bag containing not one but two brand new Chaos iPhone covers. So no: it’s not just Cara, Kendall and Gigi being given freebies. Real people are paying £175 to buy their own. Chaos is this year’s Idea I Wish I’d Got Off My Arse And Done When I First Thought About It. Like most losers, I have quite a dossier of these. I mean, status phone covers: they’re a no-brainer. All this blah about It bags and whether big bags are the new small bags is largely irrelevant now that our affections have been so wholly transferred. You don’t keep your bag by your bed; you don’t place it lovingly on the table while you eat, and you certainly don’t take it to the toilet when you do your morning wee. Everyone should stop making unfeasibly overpriced handbags and start churning out unfeasibly overpriced phone cases instead. To be fair, there are a lot out there already. In the quest to parlay their brand identity onto a 14cm x 7cm rectangle, some designers have been more successful than others. Moschino’s kitsch rubber cases are ace (and at £40, affordable), but it’s harder to fathom Dolce & Gabbana’s £485 leather case embellished with crystals. Although compared with Louis Vuitton’s latest offering, that’s a bargain. The price of LV’s gold croc Eye-Trunk? £3,550. Apparently it’s ‘more than a protective cover…. [it’s] a statement.’ A statement of insanity, yes, but god I want one.
