Brand Loyalty is a column that explores our cultural obsession with brands—like Kanye West’s discovery of Vetements, Kristen Stewart's embracing of Outdoor Voices, or Young Thug’s love for blouses.
Back when the iPhone was announced, in January 2007, it wasn’t the only beautifully designed touch-screen phone in town. It had a big competitor: the LG Prada.
The LG Prada—yes, that Prada—was the world’s first capacitive touch-screen phone, which meant it was the first phone to look the way every phone in the world, including the iPhone, now looks: The entire device was a glass screen coated with a conductor that allowed the human finger to control it. (Not a keypad in sight, just a big glass screen living in the moment!) Though the iPhone’s ubiquity seems like it was inevitable now, back in 2007, when you would ask your friends for directions and decide what to eat based on where it fit into a giant government-issued triangle, the LG Prada was “definitely a worthy competitor to the iPhone that we should keep our eye on,” according to a review published in Gizmodo.
The LG Prada was announced about a month before the iPhone, but LG and Prada had been openly discussing its creation since 2006, when the phone was presented at Germany’s prestigious iF Design Awards and won—which, in retrospect, seems like an uneasy precursor to Apple’s infamously elusive development process. At an event the month after the Macworld convention where Steve Jobs revealed “an iPod, a phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device”—all in one beautiful machine!—the head of LG Mobile’s Handset R&D Center even accused Apple of stealing their design, saying, “We consider that Apple copycat Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.”
Like everything with the Prada logo on it, the original LG Prada was a feat of design, and much more than a prefab object the brand slapped its name on. Prada CEO and president (and husband to Miuccia) Patrizio Bertelli said in a press release that the phone was intended to be as technologically innovative as its fashion products were: “We were looking [for] a breakthrough. Consistent with our approach, we are not branding an existing product; rather, Miuccia and I have been working with LG to give this new phone a very strong character and unique style, both in its contents and in its design. We, just like our partners at LG, are known for the attention to detail and uncompromising quality of our products. And we find these characteristics in the new mobile phone.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the phone was priced at nearly $800. (The first iPhone cost $499; the latest model, the iPhone 11, costs over $1,000.) Gizmodo noted that, compared to the iPhone’s almost surreally bright screen, the LG Prada seemed somewhat dark; the minimalist, monochrome look, they were told, was meant to reflect the “Prada experience,” which is to say it was in line with the brand’s sleek, anti-status black nylon accessories.
Though Prada made perhaps the splashiest and savviest effort in mobile technology, they weren’t the only fashion brand with their name on a cell phone—they weren’t even the first. In the fall of 2004, Kimora Lee Simmons’s brand, Baby Phat, announced a collaborative phone with Motorola that put her sexy cartoon cat logo and 0.4 carats of real diamonds on a quilted pink clamshell phone. (That famous photo of Killa Cam in all pink with the cell phone? That’s him at the Baby Phat show with the blushing pink specimen itself, demonstrating the phone’s fashion cred.) It was a whopping $699.99. In 2005, Donatella Versace introduced the limited-edition gold flip phone with a Swarovski crystal hand strap for 799 euros. You could use it “to stream video or SMS your friends, Versace style,” the website FashionUnited wrote at the time.
Nor would the Prada LG be the last of the designer cell phones, even as the iPhone became the standard mobile device. LG’s development of a touch-screen phone had left Samsung worrying about a once-distant competitor, so they decided to make up for it by collaborating with Giorgio Armani for a premium branded touch-screen phone, released in the fall of 2007. Electronics companies were itching to collaborate with fashion brands for phones; when Dior released their unit, the $5,100 quilted flip-style Diorphone, the brand’s president told WWD he had fielded calls from multiple tech partners before deciding to produce the phone on their own, taking “a luxury approach.”
Though the idea of a fashion-branded phone seems almost perversely appealing in a world in which Supreme collaborates with Post-it, why were these luxury houses so desperate to make cell phones?
As Dana Thomas wrote in her book Deluxe, which was released in 2007, at the height of the fashion-cell-phone craze, “Brands [were] expanding their reach by licensing their names on anything and everything once again.” She mentioned the Versace and Prada phones as examples, quoting a Prada spokesperson as saying that “a mobile phone is more and more an accessory...an object of design and style, a status symbol which almost defines a person—definitely one of the most important objects in a woman’s handbag.” In other words, cell phones were still a luxury object, but they were quickly becoming something else, and fashion, at that moment entering a new age of pop-cultural relevance, felt poised to market products at that sweet spot: the things that you want so much that you end up needing them. A phone might not be as expensive as a handbag, but it’s certainly more necessary.
The iPhone, of course, quickly won out, and fashion brands responded by ceasing to compete. Apple had beat them at their own game of the alchemy of consumer desire. Whether they copied the LG Prada or not, Apple built upon a very mid-aughts idea created by the fashion industry: the luxury masstige product. Apple realized it didn’t need a fashion brand to create a “premium” product. The iPhone was the first luxury product that felt accessible to everyone, that everybody wanted, and that, most importantly, everybody could have.
The iPhone also won out, of course, because it was a superior product. By May of 2007, about a month before the iPhone arrived in stores, Gizmodo decided it was “settling this iPhone vs LG Prada nonsense,” and wrote that the LG’s browser was pitiful and the phone didn’t have Wi-Fi. In sum, they wrote, it’s “just like a regular phone.” Which, in retrospect, sounds like the ultimate luxury.
