Taking an extra eight minutes to draft out a text…that’s hot. At least if you ask Paris Hilton.
The socialite who reigned over the 2000s with an iron fist, or rather a small chihuahua, welcomes back the Y2K resurgence with seemingly open arms. Jeans are low-rise and phones are low-tech, and Hilton thinks it’s a fad that is born of trying to break out of the mold.
“Flip phones are making a comeback right now because people wanna flip the script, do something different,” the famous former carrier of an iconic pink Razr told Fortune at an event hosted by Motorola. Of course, Hilton’s sign-off happened at Motorola’s event as the phone company unveiled a new model of flip phone.
Trend cycles come in the blink of an eye these days, as fueled by fast fashion and an extremely online era. But the year 2000 has been a point of fascination for a couple of years now (which feels equal to a decade these days), finding a captive audience with Gen Zers in particular. Both our low and high points have come back to bite, including leg warmers, trucker hats, and even dresses over pants. And now phones have caught the new-millennium bug.
Over the past couple of years, a cohort of young adults appear to have increasingly turned to flip phones as a result of a longing for the past and a need to make a digital detox, notes lecturer Omah H. Fares for The Conversation. Unplugging can perhaps cause some ease, as early studies show internet addiction has been linked to feelings of depression and anxiety.
Even Gen Z pop star Dove Cameron announced last year that she was switching to a flip phone for a bit, after saying being online “was joyless for me at this point.” Of course, such unpluggers are still a niche group, and the pervasiveness of logging off might be overblown, but interest is not waning yet. Growing up on the internet, Gen Zers have started to look for guardrails as anecdotes of many young adults using the Do Not Disturb function as a way of detaching from their phone.
“It’s not a small trend,” Lars Silberbauer, chief marketing officer of Nokia Mobile and HMD Global, told the Wall Street Journal in 2023. In November of said year, Arite Beaty wrote for ZDNet that internet searches for flip phones increased by “15,369% over the past year among Gen Z and younger millennials.” And adults of all ages are using flip phones when they feel like they’re spending too much time online, citing feelings of boredom or fatigue. Perhaps people are reacting to the ubiquitousness of the tech world as the new wave of AI is hurried in, creating their own back-to-the-future phenomenon as they search for something familiar.
“It’s nostalgic,” Hilton says of the phone, bringing up an emotion that is especially prevalent during times of socioeconomic turmoil as people long for something comfortable and familiar. Especially vulnerable to the current turndown and especially online, younger generations are therefore prone to experience nostalgia—Stephanie Harlow writes in a blog post for consumer insights company GWI. Companies have taken note, as customers are more likely to pay more when nostalgia is triggered—per a 2014 study published by the Journal of Consumer Research.
Some of these young adults are finding comfort in a time before they were born—a time before the World Wide Web. And Harlow adds that even people born after the 1990s long for the era: 37% are nostalgic for that decade. The allure is simple in Hilton’s eyes: “Gen Z loves flip phones because they love things that are iconic,” she quips.
