Before the crack-phone iPhone, there was the no-frills cockroach of a mobile produced by the Finnish company Nokia. The tough plastic devices with an often joked-about indestructibility factor, specifically the Nokia 3310 model, were the bare minimum of early cell phones, offering a simple contact list, an alarm, and T9 text messaging. It was easy to spot them—every noughties middle-school kid and their mother had one. It had a great marketing factor, too: Its greeting screen loaded (slowly) with a digitized incarnation of Michelangelo’s Adam and God touching fingertips.
Though Nokia stopped producing the 3310 cell phone a while back, its logo rose from the technological graveyard and onto the runway at Martine Rose’s Spring 2018 menswear show in London, where it made cameos on a white T-shirt and silver belt. Rose reinterpreted the emblem—squared-off O, blue font, and all—to read “Rose,” replacing “Connecting People” with “Martine.” The clever graphic was in step with rest of the collection, which was inspired by the underground scene in Toronto during the ’80s and ’90s. “I got interested in the outdoor lifestyle—climbing, golfers, bicycle messengers,” Rose told Vogue’s Sarah Mower. “It was about making the ordinary extraordinary again.”
As random as it might seem, Nokia wasn’t such a wild choice to work with. The oddball take on commercial labels has been a bit of a trend du jour of a while now. Just today, Ikea announced its second collaboration with the fragrance company Byredo, while Off-White is slated to also work with the company. Both came after Balenciaga sent a leather version of the big-box store’s plastic Frakta tote down the runway for a whopping $2,145. (Also, fun fact: Of-the-moment-queen of cheeky fashion stylist Lotta Volkova owns a spoof Nokia logo shirt that reads “Vodka Connecting People”). Plus, there’s the nostalgia factor: In a world of high-tech gadgets, the phone and its logo offer a comforting blast from the past. Younger generations may look at the low-tech phone as passé or dorky, but for those in the know in fashion and beyond, it turns out that Nokia, well, still has the power to connect people.