Who's going to make Apple fashionable now?

With the metaverse looming, a designer change could make a big difference.

So Jony Ive, the former design director and consultant to Apple, and the man most responsible for the visual appeal of Apple products - the man who helped turn computers and phones into objects of desire, who made them more than just feature vectors, but rather identity badges - and his former employer would have agreed to sever their last ties.

What is What does this mean for the "mixed reality" headset, this eye-worn metaverse that Apple is rumored to release in the second quarter of next year? What does this mean, in other words, for those of us whose drive to engage in the alternate reality could be transformed by such a device?

After all, if ever a company could solve the problem of how to design a piece of equipment that would make you want to put a contraption on your face that would allow you to enter another world while your body existed in this one, it would be Apple.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">If ever a company could overcome the precedent of Google Glass and even Oculus to make a laptop that didn't look like to a computer, it would be the company that had done it with laptops, music, headphones and above all the smartphone. If ever a brand could solve the challenge of making entering the metaverse fashionable - a different problem, after all, then making fashion for the metaverse but equally crucial to making the metaverse meaningful (and accessible ) - chances were, it would be Apple.

Except maybe more.

Without Mr. Ive Is it Apple's time as the bridge between hard wear and soft wear is finally coming to an end? Are we at a tipping point between the old Apple and the new — between Apple as it was and another Apple as it could be — like Phoebe's Celine versus Hedi's Celine?

Either In fact, this heralds a paradigm shift of another kind.

For most technology companies, the A designer's departure wouldn't cause a stain in the public eye, but part of Apple's brilliance is how the company has borrowed from the fashion world to drive consumption.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">It was Steve Jobs' understanding that fashion strategies could be co-opted and applied to previously boring situations and boring consumer electronics, so they became tactile and visually appealing - slimmer, sleeker, more chic - and helped the company transcend its industry. It was Mr. Jobs who embraced the value of a new model for each season; who understood how planned obsolescence, the essential premise of fashion, could be applied to operations; and how a system of values ​​could be integrated into the aerodynamic lines of a device so that it became more than the mechanical sum of its parts.

And that is Mr Jobs who formed a partnership with a young designer named Jony Ive, a Briton from London who joined the company in 1992 and defined the look of Apple for decades, inspiring a whole fashion week of brands for create accessories (iPad cases, iPhone cases) for the offers.

It is significant that after the death of Mr. Jobs in 2011, Mr. Ive has come out of the shadows, with Tim Cook, the managing director, to become the face of the company. If Mr. Cook was the unpretentious technocrat, Mr. Ive was the visionary: friend of Marc Newson (creator of the Lockheed salon) and designer Azzedine Alaïa, promoter of the fusion of technology and fashion that took place around from the debut of the Apple Watch in 2014.

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