Are We Having Meaningful Phone Conversations Anymore?

There’s something so ‘90s and chic about using the phone for its intended purpose: to talk.

Today for #NEVERWORNS, I’m talking about why we should be using a phone to have concentrated conversations—no scrolling while talking! There is something old school and chic about it—and that shows through the body, too. PS. A new #NEVERWORNS episode coming soon! And as always, subscribe to the Substack, watch the YouTube, and buy #NEVERWORNS clothes here if you want to get freaky!

Annie Morton by Peter Lindbergh (1996).

Whatever happened to simply talking on the phone? When we used the phone only for its original intent…to talk? A person’s concentration on what the person on the other line was saying radiated from them as they leaned their body or tilted their head towards the speakerphone. And that was kind of tender. Sometimes, kind of hot. Even sexy depending on the conversation. I love the idea of putting the phone to my mouth but I don’t do this anymore. I yabber into an embedded microphone of a wired headphone and read DailyMail headlines at the same time. My man can tell when I’m not fully present, too, and will say something like, “You’re scrolling, I know it!” It’s lazy. It’s unfocused. It’s not hot for me or the other person on the line. 

An image from Vogue September 1981

This allure of talking on the phone, like really pressing that 5G-packed thang to your face, came up recently while looking at a Peter Lindbergh image of model Annie Morton from 1996. The moment is so everyday and yet so aspirational: Morton is walking down a New York City street in a black tank dress, smoking a cigarette with a black phone crammed to her ear. She’s a bit ruffled and a bit rushed and seems a bit pissed. Yet, we know she’s in that conversation. This woman is focused so much that she’s holding the cigarette beyond the filter. The allure here isn’t that she is incredibly stunning—sure!—it’s that she is speaking into the phone with intent. Undivided attention is a great look.

Alicia Keys in “You Don’t Know My Name” (2003).

When I think of women who look great while talking on their phones, I go back to the late ’90s and early ’00s music videos of Jennifer Lopez and Alicia Keys. The phone is always central to the plot of the music video and it is the mobile embodiment of these women’s love interests. Lopez loves a phone moment in her music videos, whether she’s scolding her absent man in “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” (2001), fighting with LL Cool J in “All I Have “(2002), making plans with Big Pun or Fat Joe in “Feelin' So Good” (1999). I love how she handles the phone because it reflects the intimacy of how she’d touch or gesture to a person. Sometimes, Lopez almost flirts with it and a small smirk will flicker over her face, her eyes coyly downturn, and her French manicure spills over the shaft of the phone. The same goes for Alicia Keys in her music videos. That woman seems to perpetually have a phone glued to her ear or is longingly leaning in some pay phone. In the music video “You Don’t Know My Name” (2003), she slinks away to a quiet corner and presses the phone to her cheek, almost cradling it while trying to set a date with Mos Def. It’s like she wants to sink into the perforated speaker like it was a lover. 

Whether we’re talking Lindbergh or Lopez, the fashion in these images is killer and no one could recreate these worlds because there was no tech then as there is today. Today, talking on the phone is basic and yet these women are aspirational even in their most banal form because that concentration translates down to the silhouette of their bodies. Their postures are less rounded; their stances less contorted to that scoliotic back curl that comes with today’s incessant texting and scrolling. No Quasimodo tech-neck symptoms here. These women existed, no wait, lived, before the accouterments of mobile phones: the texting, the emails, and the old school term of “surfing the web”. There’s a lightness. 

A still from J.Lo in “Feelin’ So Good” (1999)

I remember this lightness sometimes, especially when I really began to fall in love. I’d pace around my apartment talking to my now-fiancé about nothing with the phone glued to my ear. When being engaged in a great phone conversation, there’s a certain lean of the body; an ache that exists only in the slightest head tilt. It reminds me of a really great, very poetic Ericsson ad from 1997. (In fact, many cellphone ads used to read like poetry.) This Ericsson ad in particular shows a beaming woman on a tiny phone with an extendable antenna that boasts the caption: “Even from a thousand miles away, he could still make her laugh until she cried. That’s the power of voice.” On that note, I’d suggest cutting the cord and stop talking through headphones (or AirPods). The most valuable thing you can give someone is your unscrollable time.

A poetic Ericsson ad from 1997.