Why Gen Z is plugging in wired headphones and tuning out AirPods

The must-have accessory for fall? According to Gen Z, it's a $30 pair of wired headphones.

So why are "It" girls like Lily Rose Depp and the Olsen twins ditching wireless earbuds and opting instead to plug into their devices? "Wired is an attitude," Shelby Hull, the 24-year-old creator of the Instagram account @wireditgirls, told Mashable. "It is the way you carry yourself and move about the world."

On TikTok, actor and model Lily Rose Depp is the coolest of "It" girls. She’s French, a nepotism baby, and she moves through the world with a studied carelessness. Her wired earphones are an extension of herself: unbothered.

"She’s very put together, but it’s like, 'How did I end up in this designer outfit looking so cool and put together? It just kind of fell into place,'' Hull said. "Wired headphones kind of say that, too. It’s like oh, 'I put no thought into this, I can’t be bothered right now.'"

TikTok user @taylorchalametdepp4's video praising Depp's use of wired earphones and @almondbutterchaos's clip captioned "why am I falling back in love with wire earphones" are examples of the kinds of wired discourse found on the platform.

This TikTok is captioned "why am I falling back in love with wire earphones." Credit: Tiktok / almondbutterchaos

The fledgling idea of the wired "It" girl arrived in 2019 when Liana Satenstein wrote a piece for Vogue about how Bella Hadid was bringing back the accessory, which had largely been replaced in our collective consciousness by the arrival of Apple's AirPods in 2016. Then, on Sept. 30, 2021, the TikTok account @thedigifairy posted a viral video where they declared "wired headphones are officially a vintage accessory." With 2 million views and counting, the video has sparked a debate on Twitter over whether or not the wired look ever truly went out of fashion.

The next day, @wireditgirls made its first post. The account now has 1,665 followers, and it features the likes of Bella Hadid, Zoe Kravitz, and Michelle Li going about their days and looking effortlessly cool while wearing their wired headphones.

"Liana [Satenstein] tweeted, 'some idiot/genius, please make a page of just hot girls wearing wired headphones,'" Hull said of the genesis of the account. "I was on my way back from a CycleBar class, and I had five photos pop up in my head of Zoe Kravitz and Lily Rose Depp wearing wired headphones. So I made the page and started posting that morning."

AirPods, she says, always lacked the cool-girl factor.

They are functional and practical, which is the antithesis of cool. We use them because Apple forced us to. AirPods were released alongside the iPhone 7, the first iPhone without a universal headphone jack. These days, iPhone users are faced with the choice of shelling out a minimum of $150 on AirPods or using the standard EarPods that come with the device (the ones you can’t use with your laptop or while charging your iPhone).

AirPods are now synonymous with a decidedly uncool aesthetic: that of tech and finance bros. They beg to be paired with a Patagonia Better Sweater fleece and worn while on a call where men use incomprehensible words like "synergy" in real conversations.

"For a while it felt like selling out if you bought AirPods, and I despise tech culture so much that I refused to get them for that reason," Catherine Condit, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student who has never purchased AirPods, told Mashable.

Ruby Sutton retired her AirPods in 2019 when she studied abroad in France. "I started using wired earphones again during study abroad because, in France, AirPods were a really bad look," explained the 22-year-old.

Wired earphones make a different kind of statement. A person wearing wired headphones is disassociating themselves from modern trends altogether. They want to be plugged into simpler times.

Apple released their first pair of earphones alongside the first iPod in 2001. The advertisements for iPods in the aughts were iconic, and the wired earphones played a key role. The ads showed black silhouettes of people dancing on brightly colored backgrounds, and the iPod and its headphones stood out in stark contrast in white. These ads were on billboards and on TV, the video ads were paired with cool songs like “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” by Jet and “Technologic” by Daft Punk.

Today, wired headphones remain cool, but for a different reason.

"I love the signal they send," added Hull. "It’s like, 'Please don’t speak to me, I’m too busy.' AirPods don’t really say that. I’ll still talk to someone if I see their AirPods in, but when you have just a wire in, it’s clear: 'Don’t approach me.' I think that’s the perfect accessory."

The wire is a visible accessory that declares you're listening to something, that you're occupied. To be plugged in, you must tune everything else out. You have to physically remove your earbud to talk to someone. AirPods don't yield that kind of power. They never could. And at a significantly cheaper price point, wired headphones are an accessible trend for everyone.

TikTokker Torie Tagliavia posted a video under the handle @toriestyle with the text "good thing these headphones are trendy because i can't afford air pods." The 22-year-old told Mashable that she never purchased AirPods and recently started seeing wired headphones all over her For You Page.

Tagliavia took advantage of the trend to show off the wired headphones that she never stopped wearing. Credit: Tiktok / toriestyle

Going wired isn't solely isolated to Extremely Online people or celebrity obsessives. It's now moved off our screens and into high schools. Lilabel Kierstead, a 14-year-old student from Western Massachusetts, confirmed it: "If you want to have a good sense of style or be indie, then you might use wired headphones."

The youths have spoken.

Related video: Well, of course there's an AirPods 'washing machine' now