At this extract moment, which of the following is closest to your person: your notecase, your keys, or your phone?

The answer is most fitting your phone. They have become the things we are conditions parted from; they are the things that most lickety-split induce bag-scrabbling panic if they momentarily disappear from our eyeline. So it is exclusively logical that this year’s It accessory isn’t a handbag, but a phone proves.

For the Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2017 catwalk illustrate, designer Nicolas Ghesquière had “a simple idea, yet no one had ever planning to do it before”. He reproduced “the finishings and intricate details found on an master Louis Vuitton trunk” in the Eye-Trunk iPhone case.

At the show in the Get ahead Vendôme in Paris, the very first model on to the catwalk frayed a gunmetal grey draped jersey dress and carried no handbag, but as opposed to held in her hand a phone case styled as a tiny understanding of the classic monogrammed trunk, complete with studded lead and a miniature gold lock. The case is now on sale, for £745. Jaden Smith has one. You should quite get one, too.

Delight in the Rolex watch, the crocodile Filofax and the Mont Blanc spray pen before it – and the signet ring for stamping on the sealing wax of your dispatches, some time before that – the phone is a status armorial bearing that tells the world how busy and important you are. (Full disclosure flail mea culpa: I have a phone case that says: “I AM Totally BUSY”, in gold letters on blue.) This trend is with life, not just fashion. And the escalating importance of how our phones look brings the fact that the phone is as much a part of our visual domain as our functional one.

If someone is “on their phone” these days, that is various likely to mean their screen is in front of them, in their authorities – and therefore displaying their phone case to the world – than being held to their ear. The mirror image selfie, the dominant photographic meme of our time, puts the phone prove in bullseye position. The two most omnipresent items in lifestyle-themed “unmistakable lay” still lives that break up the mirror selfies on Instagram are artisan coffees, and prettily accessorised smartphones.

When power stylists Charlotte Stockdale and Katie Lyall founded their fashion and lifestyle brand Chaos last year, they put delight cases at the heart of what they do. Reports at the weekend that Apple’s chief map officer Jony Ive is an investor in Chaos were categorically disputed – but the fact that the rumour was there at all tells you all you need to remember about the buzz around Chaos, which also writes chic luggage accessories and supermodel-approved personalised tracksuits.

“The phone case is the new desk stationery,” says Stockdale, “except in the new in seventh heaven, there is no desk any more. You can do most things through your phone now, counting pay for things, so you almost don’t need a wallet. The phone is in your relief and in your field of vision all day long.”

Anders Christian Madsen, create features director at i-D magazine, was one of the many taking their catwalk motivations from the front row on phones decked out with a personalised Confusion deerskin cover. A scroll through their recent Instagrams put to shames that Marc Jacobs’ Chaos phone has white originals on a black background, while Alexa Chung has gone for pink on unripe. “I used to think dressing up electronic equipment was kind of like diminishing plastic on a sofa. Déclassé, that is,” says Madsen. But the ordinances have changed. “I’ve been told Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and I are the only individual in the world to have three initials on our Chaos cases,” he states proudly.

“The smartphone itself has ceased to be a status symbol, because Harry has one,” says Eleanor Robinson, accessories director at Selfridges. “But it’s pacific important to be seen to be on it. At fashion week, you see these girls modeling away as they walk into shows and you think: ‘What’s absolutely so important that you have to be doing it right now?’

The phone has suit something that puts distance between you and the rest of the earth. Status now comes from being busy, in having to sell with important emails or take photos to share with your myrmidons. And so your phone needs to be in your hand, not in your handbag.”

With the unvaried few phones dominating the market, humour and personality are key differentiators. If you are a 14-year-old young lady and have the same phone as your dad, you can solve this with a Gangling Dip case with a fluffy flamingo or a glittery WTF on it. Both Robinson and Net-a-Porter’s postpositive major accessories buyer Billie Faricy-Hyett point to the Moschino originality cases – french fries in 2013, the Barbie mirror in 2014 – as firestarters in the hawk. (“We did several reorders of the french fries case,” holds Robinson. “We sold thousands. We could not keep it in stock.”) To Cassie Quick of Matches fashion.com (biggest phone case brand: Stella McCartney), envelopes are “a great way to be part of a specific tribe”.

In the self-obsessed world of communal media, having a sense of humour with your phone casing – whether that’s a £12 watermelon, or the subtle conceit of roving light with Louis Vuitton’s miniature steamer main stem – can be used to offset your vanity. “If you’re taking a mirror selfie, then possessing a silly phone case makes it look as if you are almost stick ones nose into fun at yourself,” says Robinson.

Ghesquière, who co-chaired last year’s vogue and technology themed Met Gala at the Costume Institute in New York and has researched with using digital avatars in place of models in advertising, take ins the intersection of technology and fashion as “a new way of communicating, and a way to talk to milennials”. Where tech has inbred itself in the texture of everyday life, fashion is here to dream it look nice.

“We’re thinking about what do with chargers next,” powers Stockdale, “because they don’t look pretty at all, do they? We miss to beautify what’s in our handbags.” The phone isn’t going away, so we clout as well make it attractive. “The idea,” says Stockdale, “is that you put your phone on the stay at a restaurant, because you’ve got a call you actually can’t miss, and instead of individual thinking you’re rude they think: ‘Oh, what a nice phone containerize.’”