The Church Tower Phone

I’ve lost my phone seven times. Once in a taxi, once at a café in New York, once on a bus, once at my aunt’s place, once at a party that got seriously out of hand. Once I left it with a jealous ex, which was less losing it than abandoning it as a tactical retreat. And once—without exaggeration—it fell off a church tower where some friends and I had climbed to film something stupid. Most of those phones I never got back. Each time: a trip to the phone store, a significant chunk of money gone, a renewed low-grade contempt for myself.

The Berlin-based label Phonie has a simple answer to this problem: a case with a chain attached. Which sounds like it should look terrible—the kind of accessory that announces you’ve abandoned aesthetics in favor of pure anxiety management—but they’ve somehow made it work. Gold-linked chains, transparent case, cross-body or around the neck. The kind of thing that looks considered rather than desperate, Instagram-ready in the sense that it could actually survive being photographed without humiliating you.

Whether any of it would have saved the church tower phone is unclear. That one had momentum working against it. But the taxi phone, the party phone, the hostage phone—those I could have kept. There’s something genuinely humbling about a product whose entire value proposition is: you are a person who loses things, and we are offering you a leash.