Can fashion save AI glasses from its surveillance problem?

SINGAPORE – Kylie Jenner is making green juice. She is sorting through the morning mail, cuddling a cat and dodging assistants who need the 28-year-old mogul’s sign-off on undoubtedly significant projects. And she is doing it all in her Meta glasses.

That is the premise of Meta’s latest advertisement for its smart glasses collaboration with the American reality TV star, the Starfire by Kylie Edition – part of the Facebook owner’s first line of AI frames launched fully under its own branding on June 23.

The video unfolds from Jenner’s POV, in the first-person view characteristic of content filmed on AI glasses.

Jenner is busy, constantly buttonholed in her home by the employees who keep the engine of her massive celebrity running. Then suddenly, she breaks free. She grabs a can of spray paint and black leather gloves, and is off on a getaway drive.

Destination: a roadside billboard with her face on it, peering over the tops of the lowered Meta sunnies she co-designed. She struts up to the canvas and sprays her girlish signature “xo Kylie” on the negative space.

The viewer learns nothing about what the frames can do: its in-built camera, the AI agent voiced by Jenner that can help play music, send texts, take calls hands-free and decode its surroundings, or its live translation ability.

What one does glean is that the slim oval glasses are so very Kylie Jenner, one of the most bankable figures in pop culture today.

The sales pitch is centred not on the tech but the aesthetics and cultural relevance of the glasses, a strategy that has feminised a product once derided as dorky tech bro gear.

It also represents a new peak of the tech-fashion dalliance. Meta’s positioning of smart glasses as a fashion item began in 2021 with the launch of its first range of frames in partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban, and is fast becoming the industry standard.

In May, Google and Samsung unveiled their new AI glasses with American retailer Warby Parker and edgy South Korean brand Gentle Monster, set for a fall release in 2026.

Parent company of Snapchat, Snap, announced a chunky new pair of augmented-reality glasses in June with a campaign shot by fashion photographer Steven Meisel and starring the likes of model Kaia Gerber.

Meta rang in the Starfire with a fashion-flavoured launch party, attended by glitterati including Hollywood stylist Law Roach and South African-German model Nara Smith. Chart-topping DJ and former fashion student Peggy Gou was on the decks.

The pivot has raised questions about how far fashion can take the controversial product, which has been poo-pooed over privacy concerns since the days of Google Glass – Silicon Valley’s first attempt at selling spectacles-cum-computers in 2013.

Will this latest attempt work?

Fashion ballast

According to market intelligence provider IDC, sales of smart glasses without displays surged 167 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2026, reaching about 2.25 million units globally. The entire category shipped roughly the same number (2.7 million) units in all of 2024.

A good part of this market is almost single-handedly carried by Meta, which in the first part of 2026 accounted for 69 per cent of the market, IDC’s vice-president of devices research Bryan Ma tells The Straits Times.

In 2025, it sold seven million pairs, triple that of the previous two years combined.

The tech giant’s deal with Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica has been critical to its dominance and was an inflection point for the sector, says Ma.

“Ray-Ban Metas have been doing well because they actually look like normal glasses. It’s just that they happen to have technology embedded inside, and they’re easy to use.”

This overcomes the design problem that doomed the cyborgian Google Glass, pulled two years after launch in 2015. “Too sci-fi,” says Ma.

Save for the AI agent, the Google goggles had similar functions to today’s smart glasses, but it pushed its bleeding-edge specs at the expense of aesthetics. Users have to be willing to wear and be seen wearing the glasses, after all.

Says Ma: “Just pushing the technology alone, as we’ve seen with some of those earlier examples, has its limitations. Whereas, if it’s sold as a fashion product, it widens the appeal towards the mainstream.”

Apart from the design boost, fashion tie-ups also open up access to distribution channels and a network accustomed to managing inventory and doing retail point of sale, he adds. EssilorLuxottica, he notes, is the biggest eyewear group in the world.

“Pulling in EssilorLuxottica meant that Meta was able to get a number of big brand names like Ray-Ban, Oakley and so forth, which carried a huge amount of marketing but also distribution in the places where a technology vendor normally wouldn’t be able to go to. (Their glasses) are not just going to Challenger and Courts. They’re going into Capitol Optical and these other stores where normally you would not find technology products,” he says.

But Ma stops short of giving Ray-Ban full credit for Meta glasses’ breakthrough. “The product is easy to use. It’s an affordable price. It also hit all those right points.” While Google Glass had a US$1,500 (S$1,930) price tag, Meta glasses start at US$299.

Still, for Hailey Teo, a local fashion influencer and recent smart glasses convert, fashion is the deciding factor.

She describes her angular Ray-Ban Meta Blayzer Optics frames as edgy, and good with jeans and a cute top, even a leather jacket. “Fashion is more important to me than the tech. I love tech for sure, but I also care a lot about aesthetics,” she says.

The 27-year-old was much taken by Ray-Ban Meta’s campaign with K-pop idol Jennie; “influenced”, in fact.

“(Before), I would watch reels about (smart glasses), but it was not something I thought of getting myself. It didn’t look good and felt out of reach for me, like this piece of tech would not interweave with my lifestyle,” she says.

The Jennie images changed her mind, though the ubiquity of AI chatbots in the last few years sweetened the pitch.

Visually and technologically, smart glasses no longer feel foreign, Teo concludes.

Fashion businesses are eyeing a slice of the growing wearable technology pie, says Shannon Sim, programme leader of the fashion media and industries bachelor’s programme at LaSalle College of the Arts.

According to the BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 report, sales of wearables – rings, bracelets, watches, and eyewear – reached US$42 billion in 2025 and is set to remain the fastest-growing accessory category till 2028.

In the dominant smartwatch sector, luxury brands Hermes, Missoni and Swarovski have put out interchangeable Apple Watch straps.

Says Sim: “More broadly, I think these tie-ups also suggest fashion brands are increasingly understanding how they can integrate into this whole ecosystem, or the interface industry. The fashion sector is recognising that AI is going to be part and parcel of our lives and wearable technology is going to be part of our identity. Clothing has always mediated between the body and society and AI wearables extend that role.

“The benefit is mutual.”

The privacy sore

Yet, the cyberpunk age in which all glasses are smart still feels remote.

Tech barons say mass adoption is inevitable, with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg claiming on an earnings call in July that people who do not own smart glasses may eventually be at a “significant cognitive disadvantage”.

The numbers do not square with that. IDC expects the sector to shift 14 million units in 2026 – an increase on 2025, but still only a fraction of the nearly 300 million PCs and 1.1 billion phones sold annually.

Time and again, the so-called glasses of the future have run up against their own creepiness.

The potential to covertly photograph or film others in public has raised privacy concerns since the Google Glass days and, of late, birthed a new genre of videos by pickup artists who record unsuspecting women they chat up on the street.

Fashion kudos cannot displace the hostility for what some are calling wearable panopticons.

For one thing, these brand tie-ups target clued-in Gen Zs and millennials, says Sim.

“We’re talking about a group of consumers who are very well-informed, very connected. They’re digitally savvy, so it is not going to be ‘Oh, Gentle Monster (gets a pass) and just having a wide range of eyewear design will definitely lead to a jump in consumer acceptance.’

“I would be very reserved in saying that because this privacy and voyeurism issue is still a concern by many, and unless the design process takes this into consideration and solves it, then the end user is still going to be quite reluctant.”

Jenner’s Meta collaboration drew mostly negative comments on her social media. “Just another way for Meta to spy on you by seeing what you see every day”, “The people don’t want this” and “These should be illegal” were among the comments from Instagram users.

Singer Lorde dissed the wearables on stage at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid on July 9, an event sponsored by Ray-Ban, saying: “Can I just say, for the record, f*** the glasses. Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.”

Meta builds a small white light in the front of its glasses that blinks when they are recording, but critics say it is too discreet and can be covered with tape or disabled by modifiers.

The company announced in an update on July 7 that its glasses will automatically disable recording if users attempt to tamper with the light, presumably in response to renewed criticism triggered by the Jenner launch.

A new frontier

What tech companies do with the bounty of customer data from smart glasses is another sticking point. All this suspicion towards Big Tech might just rub off on partner consumer brands, says Sim.

“I think fashion brands will need to know what kind of deal they are entering into in these collaborations, not only when it comes to (product) servicing, but also the legal ownership of the big data from these glasses classes. Brands need to be mindful that consumers have less trust in technology than in (them),” she adds.

As the arms race for facial real estate heats up, there is a sense of old objections to smart glasses fading away.

Fashion brands have sorted the design and marketing problem. A future where AI is ambient looks possible because of the mass popularity of AI chatbots. And content creators and hands-free zealots have at least partially allayed confusion about what the product is actually for.

Only social stigma remains unresolved, says Sim.

It is possible for culture to shift, says Ma, citing the normalisation of once-odious Bluetooth in-ear speakers. But the precedent is imperfect.

“It’s going to be even harder for society to adapt and finally accept the idea of cameras on glasses because of the strong emotional reaction that it can evoke among a lot of people,” he says. A more basic problem is that not everyone wears glasses.

“We’re not there yet, and it’s going to take many years before we get there.”