No matter which brand you prefer, the best phones are always improving. From the iPhone 17 Pro’s elite Fusion Camera system to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Privacy Display, expensive flagships routinely bring something new to the table. Except when it comes to design.
As we’ve discussed before here at TechRadar, the unfortunate truth is that phones have never looked more boring. Gone are the days of the motorized LG Wing and Oppo Find X, or even the flashy gold-colored iPhone 14 Pro — pick a modern flagship phone off the shelf and, more often than not, it’ll be some bland melange of glass and aluminum.
Nothing is the exception to this rule. Since emerging in 2021, the best Nothing phones have caught the eyes of tech fans with their bold and bizarre designs. The brand’s arcane Glyph LED systems and Y2K-style see-through panels have made it a go-to for tech fans who want something unique, even definitive.
And to be fair, if you are trying to make something definitive, it helps to have the defining pop star of the 2020s at the center of your latest ad campaign.
I’m your number one
Last month, Nothing announced Charli XCX as its first global brand ambassador with a campaign simply titled NOTHING (CHARLI XCX).
In the campaign, Charli poses with a handful of Nothing phones and headphones, doing her usual thing of strutting, smoldering, and generally looking cooler than most of us could ever hope to look.
The tech industry has spent a decade making everything quieter, more minimal, more monotonous. Charli has spent her career going the other way in pop. We want Nothing to feel more like that.
Nothing CEO Carl Pei
It’s genuinely difficult to explain the impact Charli XCX has had on popular culture in the last few years. After a brief flirtation with the charts in the early 2010s and close to a decade as an online cult icon, Charli conquered the mainstream in 2024 with Brat, an album so immense in impact that it spawned a tsunami of memes, two deluxe editions, the self-ironicizing movie The Moment, and even infiltrated political campaigns.
Needless to say, Nothing getting her on board — not just for this campaign but as a global ambassador who will, presumably, be sticking around — is a huge win.
Speaking on the campaign, Charli XCX said: “I’m always thinking about how my work will be experienced out in the world… [Nothing’s] ethos of prioritizing creatives is really something I look for when working with a partner.”
Nothing CEO Carl Pei added: “The tech industry has spent a decade making everything quieter, more minimal, more monotonous. Charli has spent her career going the other way in pop. We want Nothing to feel more like that.”
Indeed, the Charli collaboration is part of a wider trend in tech, as brands attempt to market increasingly streamlined products as fashion items as well as performance-based tools to a younger generation that cares more about vibes than anything else. It’s been true for a long time that most phones can do most of the things that most people need them to do, so phone makers look to trending celebs to capture the Gen-Z dollar.
For example, Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney serves as Samsung’s brand ambassador, with a particular focus on the stylish Galaxy Z Flip series of folding phones. Oppo partners with Spanish midfielder Lamine Yamal to boost its image. And The Last of Us star Bella Ramsay featured in a string of Apple Intelligence adverts around the time of the iPhone 16’s release.
“The young people I teach are of a different generation — their emotion towards technology is much more intense. I would say it’s love or hate, but somehow always addictive,” says Dr. Soomi Park, a designer and researcher who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research concerns, among other things, design and its effect on social psychology
“Nothing has Charli XCX in that promotional role, towards a targeted audience of younger people with a contradictory mindset towards new technology, where they feel more and more isolated or more and more connected,” Park adds. “Perhaps having that admirable musician character could get them to think ‘why not try it?’”
If the Nothing Phone 3 were a person, it might have a similar sense of style.
Speaking personally, I think Charli’s partnership with Nothing does feel different from other celebrity endorsements. Yes, I’m a fan of her music, but there’s something particularly authentic about this collaboration; Charli has decided to become a Nothing shareholder because of a genuine alignment between the two brands. Just as Charli XCX dominated mainstream discourse with 2024’s Brat after almost a decade in the indie pop scene, Nothing hit the big leagues with 2025’s flagship Nothing Phone 3 after years of courting enthusiasts and experimenting with design.
Nothing has built its entire brand on the back of its design philosophy. Its phones and other products are playfully weird without straying too far into the chaotic, and they’re some of the only mobiles on the market that actively spurn symmetry, making them instantly recognizable and already fairly iconic.
In kind, Charli XCX is a fashion icon — her impact is as much about image as it is rhythm and melody, blending the slick electronics of post-pandemic pop music with Berghain-ready all-black outfits and appearances at the Met Gala. If the Nothing Phone 3 were a person, it might have a similar sense of style.
I Don’t Care (about specs)
Fair warning to the TechRadar audience, innocent as you are, some of the images in this campaign are a little risqué, so you might want to avoid checking them out while at work. That is, unless you work in an office exclusively populated by open-minded, tote bag-wielding, matcha-drinking fashionistas — AKA this campaign’s target audience.
You see, as a tech nerd first and a Charli fan a close second, what I notice about this campaign is its near-total lack of detailed specs. While the video clip ostensibly centers on the long battery life of the Nothing Headphone (a), the rest of the campaign forgoes any mention of the things that light us up here at TechRadar; details on the sound quality of Nothing’s headphones or the camera capabilities of its phones are non-existent.
Instead, Nothing has set itself a new goal with this exquisitely ‘brat’-ty campaign — make its products chic.
To my eye, this is an intentional break from recent trends in tech messaging. Silicon Valley has pivoted to talking about AI capabilities and compute power above all else. Even the best folding phones, all of which sit at the cutting edge of mobile design, are promoted in terms of their engineering and productivity prowess, rather than how they make you look — how they make you feel.
“Technology is inherently affective, even when it presents itself as neutral or functional,” designer, lecturer, and TEDx speaker Morchen Liu tells me, “and the devices we carry are never just tools — they shape mood, self-perception, ritual, attention, and social identity. They sit very close to the body, and very close to the self.”
“What campaigns like this do is make that more visible,” he adds, “they acknowledge that people do not only choose devices based on utility, but also based on feeling, symbolism, and the kind of person they imagine themselves to be.”
Liu’s work — which he shares with more than 30,000 Instagram followers — is deeply involved in the blending of fashion with AI tools, reflecting a wider prioritization of software in the tech industry due to plateauing hardware capabilities.
The devices we carry are never just tools — they shape mood, self-perception, ritual, attention, and social identity.
Designer, lecturer, and TEDx speaker Morchen Liu
He continues: “Hardware has become harder to differentiate in purely technical terms, especially for consumers… one response is to make hardware feel culturally alive again. Nothing is essentially trying to reposition hardware as something expressive, not just a neutral container for software.”
Taking a step back, it seems that Nothing has been planning to cross over into the fashion space since the beginning. It’s been partnered with Swedish tech and design firm Teenage Engineering since day one, and at the end of 2025, it hired Charlie Smith, previously head of marketing at luxury fashion house Loewe, as Chief Brand Officer, adding serious haute couture experience to its leadership.
By hiring Smith and working with Charli, Nothing has won headlines in titles not normally associated with mid-tier phone companies — there’s been Vogue and Hypebeast on the fashion side, as well as music mags like MusicTech and Clash.
For curator Adam Murray, who teaches fashion communication, promotion, and image at Central Saint Martins, Nothing’s fashion focus and its campaign with Charli xcx could be an effort to garner Gen-Z support: “Appeal to the younger people and get them as loyal consumers into their 30s — that seems to be what Nothing is aiming for.”
He continues: “It’s about how significant Charli has been in the last two or three years — if she did a collaboration with Apple, you wouldn’t necessarily be that surprised that they could get someone like her, so for a relatively small brand to be able to get her is quite a coup. The way they’re presenting it makes it feel rather significant, and I’m sure that will garner lots of attention.”
“As a celebrity pop star, Charli is one of the most credible, and she’s still got that cool factor that a lot of them don’t have,” Murray adds.
However, Murray notes that, like all fashion campaigns, each element on display has been carefully engineered: “They’re trying to align themselves with what Charli means to people. The authenticity aspect is constantly there with fashion, there’s always this sense of trying to present the real […] but it’s all as constructed as everything else.”
It helps that Nothing can offer some substance behind the shining lights. As our Nothing Phone 3 review, Nothing Phone 4(a) Pro review, and Nothing Headphone (a) review detail, this is a brand that’s really hit its stride in the last year or so. Nothing phones offer great value for money and reasonable performance for their price, even if they miss the odd cutting-edge component or next-gen feature.
Make phones SXC again
Back in 2025, I pondered that the then-unreleased Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge could represent a new era for smartphones by splitting the flagship category into two branches: one focused on thin designs and lighter builds, and the other going all out with performance and camera specs at the expense of bulk.
However, this hasn’t really come to pass. Though thin phones like the iPhone Air have their fans (TechRadar Phones Editor Axel Metz among them), it’s fair to say that the thin phone trend hasn’t taken off in the way that some (and certainly Apple) hoped, with reports of low sales since, effectively, day one for both the iPhone Air and Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge.
Rather than thinness as the crucial counterweight to heavier photo-focused flagships, maybe it’s more about style.
And while top-tier phones like the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra have pushed the limits of mobile performance more than ever, these are much more expensive than the already costly slimline phones they sit above in their respective lineups.
Nothing’s campaign with Charli has got me reconsidering my position. Rather than thinness as the crucial counterweight to heavier photo-focused flagships, maybe it’s more about style.
Indeed, while we have seen a slate of iPhone Air clones hit the market, we’ve also seen middleweight brands getting creative in what seems like a backlash against the stagnating designs of Apple, Samsung, and Google.
The Xiaomi 17 Pro, for instance, features a full-width display on its rear panel, while the liquid-cooled RedMagic 11 Pro gaming phone looks like something plucked from the set of Alien. The aforementioned Oppo Find X9 Ultra is basically a point-and-shoot camera with a phone attached, while Motorola’s Razr Fold has put a geometric spin on tablet-style foldables.
I’m all for a future of weirder phone designs and fashion-first advertising. The big brands — namely Apple, Google, and Samsung — are well overdue for a design philosophy makeover (see the barely different Samsung Galaxy S24, S25, and S26, and the physically identical Google Pixel 9a and Pixel 10a).
Thanks to its partnerships with pop culture icons and luxury fashion experts, Nothing is well placed to capitalize on this shift towards aesthetics — working with Charli XCX feels like a natural extension of the groundwork the company has sought to establish since the very beginning.
As Morchen Liu explains: “The overlap between fashion and tech is increasingly natural; it’s becoming a core part of how products are positioned. I absolutely expect more brands to invest in this space, but the most successful ones will understand fashion not just as styling or campaign imagery, but as a system of identity, ritual, aspiration, and social signalling.”
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