It all started for Bailey Hikawa, the boutique phone case designer, back in 2019 when she impulsively glued a piece of wood onto the back of her iPhone 6. An emotional response ensued from people who saw it which led to mould-making lessons from an old-school prop maker in Hollywood and then hand manufacturing in a friend’s back garden shed-turned-studio. You can still get your hands on her hand made pieces as well as limited run designer cases.
The eyes are the windows to the soul, but do you know what else are? Our phones. All that data squirreled away on memory chips or cooling data storage units out in the desert. What would we do without them, eh? Framing the piece of metal and light up nodes that punctuate our daily existence never felt more important. Forget the shoes your date is wearing, what’s their phone case saying? And what vibe are you giving off? Bailey Hikawa is here to elevate the vibration.
When asked to highlight some high-profile clients, the brand founder diplomatically states “The truth about these cases is that they turn everyone into a high-profile client of mine.” The cases’ unmissable quality makes them instant conversation starters. Also, their larger-than-life proportions reshape how owners interact with their phones, giving the daily or hourly scroll a bit more gravitas – these motions we go through become instantly less casual.
When asked to highlight some high-profile clients, the brand founder diplomatically states “The truth about these cases is that they turn everyone into a high-profile client of mine.” The cases’ unmissable quality makes them instant conversation starters. Also, their larger-than-life proportions reshape how owners interact with their phones, giving the daily or hourly scroll a bit more gravitas – these motions we go through become instantly less casual.
The overarching form of the cases, any art-lover can instantly see, is Henry Moore and Jean Arp all-over in their biomorphic glory. Bailey’s foundation is in painting and sculpture, who went to art school, and lists Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Bourgeois, Ken Price, Yayoi Kusama, Constantin Brâncuși and Erwin Wurm as some of her favourite artists. Meanwhile the Geta phone cases evoke brutalist architecture. The designer explains, “When a space evokes a difference in a landscape, I get excited. For example, a Noguchi garden in a sea of high rises or the Biodome in Arizona. Our phones are miniature architectural spaces that we physically interact with on an everyday (more like psychotic) basis. Therefore, the Geta Phone Case design is an offering of difference and function to highlight our somatic experience to our iPhones.” With our phones so tied to our bodies, Bailey Hikawa cases create some distance.
The colours are mostly saturated, with an eighties feeling which is all the rage. Accredited hesitantly to growing up in Los Angeles, the feel-good hues are joyful and “about outward vibration” according to Bailey, who also mentions they make your phone harder to lose. Her palette includes acid green, a cocktail of strawberry and orange and encased yellow pasta strands. Fans of the brand are sure to stand out amongst the crowd.
All this fuss about a phone case? Yes. Because, as Bailey puts it, “We need extraordinary phone cases for the same reason we need art, movies, and play in our lives. Who said all phones should be flat, slim and fit in your back pocket? We use our phones for everything, every day, hundreds of times a day and there just aren't enough phone case design options that represent the infinite ways we use our phones. We need phone case designs that interact with our bodies, function for us, show our personalities, and call attention to our somatic relationship with our phones. Phones are a new technology to our human experience, so I find it important to push the limits, question, and wonder deeply about our relationship to our phones, and yes all while looking and feeling good too.”
