Watches, ties & handbags: What will be left to accessorise with?

Mobile phones feature a pantheon of dematerialised avatars of the 19th and 20th centuries’ inventions, from watches, cameras, calculators turntables to radios, TVs, car keys and airline tickets. Little wonder, then, that wristwatches are hardly considered ‘timepieces’ any more as even the most basic mobile phones do that job pretty well. They are now deemed and marketed as jewellery, especially for men, whose range of personal accessories are shrinking fast anyway due to changing fashions and technology.

Ties, already a shadow of their initial 17th-century fulsomeness, have accelerated their descent into extinction thanks to homestyle pandemic chic; the fate of belts is elastic for the same reason. Now wallets are in the crosshairs too, with contagion-fuelled contactless convenience via mobile phones further hastening the petering out of traditional ‘pocketbook’ staples — cash, identity, credit and loyalty cards, licences and even business cards — faster than expected.

Women’s handbags — a mainstay of the luxury accessory business — are technological evanescence-proof as they will remain receptacles of contents that cannot be dematerialised. Luxury brands sell upmarket phone cases, but the men’s accessories industry cannot afford to lose yet another crucial component of their repertoire to mobile phones.