Tech CEOs have long held the dream of a day where computers are so inextricably linked to our day-to-day lives that they become part of our bodies. This dream, for now, takes the form of wearable devices, from smart glasses to watches to barely detectable hearing aids.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most prominent wearables evangelist. In 2021, he teamed up with EssilorLuxottica, the biggest eyewear group in the world, to launch Meta’s first-generation smart glasses, the Ray-Ban Stories. At the time, Zuckerberg described the device as “an important step towards a future when phones are no longer a central part of our lives, and you won’t have to choose between interacting with the device, or interacting with the world around you”. This notion of wearable computers that enhance our interactions with the outside world is what Snap CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel calls “human-centred computing”.
Thanks to rapid developments in generative AI over the last year, this dream is looking more realistic than ever before. At Meta’s annual Meta Connect conference on 17 September in California, Zuckerberg unveiled the first AI smart glasses with an in-lens display to entirely replace the wearer’s need to get out their phone. This is possible because of the latest AI models’ so-called “multimodal” capabilities that have increased what’s possible in the realm of computer vision: AI computers can now digest visual and audible information from the outside world and provide contextual information to the wearer, without them needing their phone.
Tech companies have been working in the background to integrate this tech into glasses, and at the conference, Zuckerberg unveiled three AI-powered smart glasses models that incorporate the most advanced tech in wearables yet:
Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2, an updated version of Meta’s first AI smart glasses released in 2023, with twofold the powerful battery, 3K HD video capture and which will soon feature Meta’s “conversation focus” update, which uses AI glasses’ open-ear speakers to amplify the voice of the person the wearer is speaking to, above background noise. The glasses start at $379; Gen 1s start at $299. Meta is now categorising these glasses as “camera AI glasses”.
Photo: Courtesy of Meta
Meta Ray-Ban Display and Meta Neural Band, a new model of what Meta is categorising as “display AI glasses”, not augmented reality (AR), featuring an in-lens display where the wearer can check messages, preview photos, see live translation captions of the conversation they’re having and collaborate with visual Meta AI prompts that can interpret what they see before them — all designed to replace the wearer’s need to pull out their phone. The wearer must pair their glasses with the Meta Neural Band, an EMG (electromyography) wristband that interprets the wearers’ movements from their muscle activity to navigate the features of their glasses. The model will be available from 30 September at select US retailers, and come only in the Ray-Ban Wayfarer silhouette, starting at $799 for the glasses and the band. Expansion to Canada, France, Italy and the UK is planned for early 2026.
Photo: Courtesy of Meta
Oakley Meta Vanguard, the second AI camera glasses designed with the sports brand Oakley, aimed at high-intensity sports with a wraparound design, waterproofing, a camera and louder speakers, so the wearer can hear their music and calls above ambient noise and wind.
Photo: Courtesy of Meta
Meta’s launches come hot on the heels of Snap’s Snap OS 2.0 release last Monday, an updated version of its operating system for AR glasses, ahead of the launch of its first consumer smart glasses — Specs — next year. It’s Snap’s first attempt at glasses, after the company’s feted attempt at consumer glasses that captured video — Spectacles — in 2016. Cancelled orders and excess inventory meant Snap took a $40 million hit at the time, after the glasses were criticised for their poor video capture quality and being priced too high for the time at $129.
From eyewear to watches to rings, analysts say the booming wearables category offers up an opportunity luxury brands can’t ignore. The key feature of all wearable tech is its ability to capture data for the wearer and interpret it — a promise of self-optimisation through ‘smart’ devices. The tech companies behind the latest AI computers need brands’ design expertise to make this technology something people actually want to wear, but experts say the benefits of collaborating on these devices go both ways.
“Fashion brands have an enormous opportunity to make wearable technology desirable. People don’t want to look like technology,” says Billie Whitehouse, CEO of fashion tech firm Wearable X.
“Wearables offer something fashion and lifestyle brands have always craved: the ability to understand not just who their customer is, but how their customer actually lives in their products,” adds Whitehouse. “Until now, this kind of feedback loop has been nearly impossible. But wearables now offer a new layer: self-expression plus self-knowledge. The brands that can balance both will win.”
Where does the market stand?
The wearable devices market is booming: around 49 million wearables units were sold globally in the second quarter of 2025, up 12.3 per cent year-on-year, according to IDC data. That growth is forecast to accelerate: Grand View Research estimates that the global wearables market will reach $186 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.6 per cent from 2025 to 2030.
So far, the biggest wearables category has been smartwatches. According to IDC, of the 49 million wearables sold worldwide in the second quarter of the year, smartwatches accounted for 78 per cent (38 million units) and wristbands for 22 per cent (11 million units) — a year-on-year increase of 10 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively. China is the largest market for wearables, accounting for almost half (42 per cent, or 20.8 million units) of the devices sold worldwide in the second quarter of 2025. Huawei held the biggest market share (20 per cent) of these devices, followed by Apple (15 per cent), Samsung (6.5 per cent) and China’s BBK Electronics (6 per cent).
This is largely thanks to the initial development of the tech that sits within wristworn devices, and the fact that keeping a watch on 24-7 felt more intuitive than donning the bulky earlier versions of smart glasses for most consumers. Garmin launched the first all-in-one GPS running watch, the Forerunner 201, in 2003, to provide runners with real-time tracking of their pace and distance. The earliest attempt at wearable computing that resembled that of a phone came in 2004, when Microsoft developed its Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) and teamed up with brands like Tissot and Fossil to develop watches offering wearers data such as on-screen weather forecasts and email notifications. At the time, this tech didn’t take off with consumers, and in 2008, Microsoft discontinued its SPOT watch line.
Fast forward to 2025, the computers that now sit within smartwatches like Apple’s latest Watch Series 11 provide the wearer with advanced health-tracking data like hypertension indicators, personalised fitness motivation and sleep scores, on top of the ability to send and receive messages and calls and pay for items. Increasing capabilities have driven up adoption rates: 30 per cent of British adults own a smartwatch, according to a March survey by YouGov. Fitness trackers like Garmin and Fitbit are the second most common devices, used by around 18 per cent of the UK population, while smart glasses have barely made a dent in the market, at 3 per cent.
While early entrants to the smart glasses market, like Google’s 2013 Google Glass experiment, failed to take off due to their high price points, cumbersome design and short battery life, AI has sparked a renewed interest in the category-shifting potential of smart glasses.
“The devices needed to get smaller before they became fashion, and now they actually are,” says Kristi Woolsey, BCG Global’s immersive technology lead. “So why wouldn’t I have my glasses help me remember things and understand context? People are going to expect that from their glasses very soon.”
But this tech is nothing without brands. Tech companies are racing to partner with the fashion brands that can provide them with the design expertise, manufacturing networks and brand kudos required to create and market smart glasses that could finally become a marker of cool. Experts say it’s an unmissable opportunity for all brands with an eyewear vertical.
Photo: Courtesy of Oura
“My guess is we are less than two years away from some level of mass adoption of smart glasses,” says Woolsey. “If you’re in the eyewear industry, I think you no longer have a choice about whether you’re going to play. Now, you need to be figuring out where you’re going to play, which tech company you’ll partner with to make frames, and what data your glasses will capture.”
Zuckerberg is so bullish on the mass adoption of smart glasses that he made headlines in July for claiming during the company’s earnings call that people who do not own smart glasses may eventually be at a “significant cognitive disadvantage” to those who do own the devices. His attention seems to have completely shifted away from full-blown metaverse experiences (which failed to take off among consumers), to AR and AI-driven smart glasses.
Meta and EssilorLuxottica debuted the second generation of the Ray-Ban Meta model in 2023, and although neither company shares sales figures for specific products, both have underlined the emerging category as a core growth driver and strategic pillar. At Meta’s Connect conference, Zuckerberg said the company had been “struggling to keep up with demand” for the glasses, and that the “whole category took off a lot faster than expected”.
EssilorLuxottica recently said that revenue from sales of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled in the first half of 2025, and over the past year, the group has expanded the line into Mexico, India and the United Arab Emirates, with plans to enter further markets as expected demand grows.
Although Meta and EssilorLuxottica were the first in the ring when it comes to smart glasses with an AI component, the race to develop the first AI-powered smart glasses to go mainstream reached an inflection point this summer. All within the month of May, Google announced a string of eyewear brand partnerships, including Gentle Monster, Warby Parker and Kering, ahead of its anticipated Android XR glasses launch post-2025; OpenAI acquired Io, the startup founded by ex-Apple chief designer Jony Ive, for $6.5 billion to make a push into AI-powered hardware; reports emerged that Apple is working on smart glasses that could be released at the end of 2026; and local media reported that Korea-based Samsung plans to release smart glasses in the new year.
What will drive adoption?
Wearable technology is the business of data capture, where so-called ‘smart’ devices are pitched to consumers as a means to capture and interpret data as you wear them to help you make ‘smarter’ choices on how to live. This has led to health being the universal entry point for the adoption of (pre-AI) wearables among consumers.
Where fitness trackers and the first generation of smart watches offered more reductive features like step count and calorie tracking, as further health knowledge fuels our collective wellness obsession, experts say consumers are now demanding deeper insights from wearable tech.
“It’s the more meaningful insights that will unlock mass adoption: stress, sleep quality, recovery, early detection of illness,” says Whitehouse. “When people feel the real human benefit of wearables in their day-to-day well-being, that’s when we’ll see the breakthrough.”
Photo: Courtesy of Apple
This preventative health potential has caught the attention of policymakers, too: in July, US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plans to launch a major government campaign to encourage all Americans to wear health-tracking wearable devices by 2029, to fix the country’s health concerns.
When YouGov asked UK adults what advanced features they want from wearable devices, the most popular answer was non-invasive glucose or blood pressure monitoring (32 per cent). AI-powered health insights and early disease detection (29 per cent) and advanced stress, emotional and mental health tracking (28 per cent) followed close behind. Consumers also expressed a desire for connectivity with other systems — features such as syncing with healthcare providers (23 per cent), connecting with smart home devices (25 per cent), and real-time integration with nutrition and meal planning apps (20 per cent) were the next most popular feature suggestions.
But as wearables enter their AI-powered era, experts say consumers will soon expect these devices to deliver more convenience and self-optimisation, to the point where AI wearables are secretly helping us better communicate with one another. Already, the most popular use of Meta’s AI in the Ray-Ban smart glasses is their translation feature, a spokesperson tells Vogue Business.
“People are already using ChatGPT a lot as a coach — this whole idea of being smarter and faster is driving our AI adoption,” says Woolsey. “So although health will drive wearables in general, when it comes to AI-powered devices like smart glasses, it actually makes me think, is this a Cyrano de Bergerac moment?” where the wearer is suddenly able to express themselves better, she adds.
“If my smart glasses can understand context through their camera lens and audio, then they can provide me with discreet coaching. I could be sitting in a meeting and my glasses are listening, and I get a little whispered message in my ear that says — ‘Hey, there’s only 20 minutes to go and you haven’t said anything, you need to talk,’” Woolsey continues.
As unnerving as this sounds, there are early signs that tech companies are interested in this coaching aspect. In June, Amazon re-entered the wearables race by acquiring Bee, a startup that makes an AI wearable bracelet that listens to everything the wearer says and does, in order to create diary reminders and to-do lists — a bit like an AI wearable PA.
Tapping into the wearables space also presents brands with a huge potential upside: EssilorLuxottica CFO Stefano Grassi said in the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call that Ray-Ban’s AI-powered Meta smart glasses outsell their ordinary glasses across 60 per cent of their EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) stores.
As brands increasingly blend physical and digital store experiences as part of their “world building” marketing strategies, advocates for the new generation of AI-powered smart glasses say they could unlock new creative and practical experiences in brand’s bricks and mortar stores, too.
“Everyone is talking about AI today and the way we interact with AI tools at the moment is mostly with text prompts or sometimes verbal. AR glasses, however, unlock a new world of AI where you can bring AI-generated information into the space around you in a way that feels more natural,” says Geoffrey Perez, global director of luxury at Snap.
He points to the potential for customers in store to view a garment through the glasses’ lenses and get information about the size, fit, details about the designer, the craftsmanship, origin of materials, sustainability credentials and so on. On a more practical note, he suggests that AI glasses could also give sales associates who don’t have the colour of a specific garment a customer wants to try in stock the opportunity to show them what it would look like through AI glasses.
“Doing this through glasses feels more natural, hands-free and more contextual. The possibilities are endless and brands that have already developed AR products will have a huge head start,” he adds.
How should brands approach wearables?
The ‘always-on’ nature of AI-powered wearable devices raises significant privacy concerns — which experts say are the most important issue for fashion brands to address before entering the wearables space.
Wearables collect huge amounts of sensitive data about their wearer, from biometrics to location, which could be misused and lead to confidentiality breaches or potential discrimination. As AI enables smart glasses to listen into conversations and record photo and video footage of our surroundings, the potential privacy breaches multiply.
Consumers are aware of these risks: nearly half (48 per cent) of UK adults express concern that data collected from their devices could be used by companies to learn about their lifestyles, according to the YouGov survey.
“The reason that data is useful to us is because AI looks for patterns and it has to provide value to me, or I’m not interested in using the product. But potentially, that data is also providing value to whoever is storing it,” Woolsey says. “That gives any tech company running that platform access to my behaviour patterns, which means they can put advertisements in front of me, or there could even be potential for really dystopian cases, like for example in the US, where my insurance could be increased because the glasses heard me have a conversation with my surgeon about potential complications.”
Woolsey says that several tech companies are working behind the scenes to increase the storage capacity on the glasses themselves, so that users can use them to store more of their personal data, or store more in their own data cloud, rather than the company’s data cloud, which would circumvent some of these privacy issues.
EssilorLuxottica declined to comment on requests for information on how the group addresses privacy concerns, instead deferring to Meta on privacy policies surrounding the Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
While luxury brands are somewhat incentivised to collect consumer data to understand their customer better, the tech companies building the AI models behind smart devices are directly incentivised to collect as much consumer data as possible to train their AI. Meta’s voice privacy notice states that voice transcripts and stored audio recordings are stored by the company in the cloud for up to one year “to help improve Meta’s products”, if voice control is enabled on its products. At the end of April this year, Meta announced that Ray-Ban Meta owners could no longer opt out of having their voice recordings stored in the cloud — but users are able to delete recordings any time in settings.
Ray-Ban Meta glasses do have a recording indicator light that tells those interacting with the wearer they’re being recorded, but a worrying trend of secret hacks like “ghost dot” vinyl stickers designed to cover this light has emerged, with the products amassing millions of views on TikTok Shop.
Experts say the most critical conversation for fashion and eyewear brands looking to collaborate with tech companies to enter the wearables market surrounds privacy guardrails. They should be asking what their potential collaborator is doing about privacy, what they do to protect consumer data, and where their boundaries lie on the collection and use of consumer data.
“Partnerships need to have privacy and ethics as a huge piece of the legal agreement,” Woolsey says. “You’re not just looking for the tech company that has the functionality or the market reach. You need to say let me understand and let me codify in our contract the way that you will treat the data that comes from my customers, or you won’t treat the data because you won’t be given access to it.”
As policymakers in the US and Europe clash over how to regulate AI, it’s on brands themselves to balance the lucrative wearables opportunity with brand reputation.
“The hardest part of wearables isn’t engineering the hardware — it’s cultivating consumer trust and daily habit,” says Charles du Manoir, founder of London-based investment and consultancy firm Desygn Capital. “We often overestimate how quickly technology can scale, yet underestimate how slowly cultural norms and regulatory frameworks evolve. Just because a company can put a computer on your face doesn’t mean you’ll feel comfortable wearing it, or find enough value to make it indispensable.”
Beyond the fact that wearables are listening in to our lived experiences, the products are also uniquely emotional because they sit directly with the skin, move with the body and integrate into personal rituals. For luxury brands, this presents a key opportunity to win customer loyalty for products that could build evolving functionality, including seasonal style refreshes or on-demand updates.
“Big tech may have the technical edge, but fashion and luxury brands have the cultural edge — they know how to create desire, identity and emotional connection,” Whitehouse adds.
“If brands want loyalty, they need to combine excellent storytelling, meaningful metrics and beautiful design. The companies that win won’t just ship fast; they’ll ship products that are comfortable, meaningful and respectful of people’s data,” he continues. “Wearables live on the body — that creates intimacy and intimacy demands trust. This is not about a race to launch, but a race to earn lasting adoption.”
Q&A with Rocco Basilico, chief wearables officer at EssilorLuxottica
Photo: EssilorLuxottica
As chief wearables officer at EssilorLuxottica, Rocco Basilico engineered the company’s multi-year partnership with Meta, which yielded the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Now, he’s in charge of the group’s multi-brand strategy for a full category of AI-powered eyewear, which included an AI update for Ray-Ban and the first Oakley smart glasses released this year. Here, he discusses the future of wearable tech.
Vogue: Why do you think glasses will be the first widely adopted form of wearable tech?
While smartwatches and fitness bands saw early success, glasses occupy the most valuable real estate: our faces, close to all our senses. Glasses are already part of daily life — they’re the most natural, intuitive gateway into wearable tech. People wear them by need or by choice, so they don’t require new behaviours.
The breakthrough was miniaturising advanced technology into stylish frames people already love, and continuing to make them more powerful and versatile. They empower people to capture, connect and experience more, all through something familiar.
Vogue: Are smart glasses seen as a core driver of growth for the business going forward?
Wearables and AI glasses are a strategic growth pillar for us. We believe they can reshape both the eyewear and technology industries, creating a new market at scale. With our design heritage and global retail network, we’re uniquely positioned to make AI glasses mainstream and unlock significant business expansion in the years ahead.
Vogue: What are the main challenges when designing smart glasses that people actually want to wear?
The challenge is balance: fitting powerful technology into a small form factor while staying true to the brand’s frame design. Beyond that, we need to move past the idea of ‘gadgets’ towards eyewear that feels natural, expressive and aligned with fashion and lifestyle. Our goal is to make sure every pair complements identity and culture without compromise.
Vogue: A number of other tech companies and brands are launching competitor products in the near future. Do you think Meta and EssilorLuxottica’s brands can retain their lead?
Competition is healthy as it validates the market. We do have a clear advantage in being first to market with the top-selling smart glasses and global brand recognition with Ray-Ban and Meta. Our unmatched distribution network of 18,000 stores continues to play an important role in getting our glasses on the faces of consumers around the world.
Vogue: How should fashion and eyewear brands approach wearable technology?
Fashion and eyewear brands can no longer look at technology as something separate from style. The two are converging to define the future and the more we embrace the notion within this industry, the more we will see innovations come to life. The key to integrating wearable technology into product roadmaps is to ensure that the products enhance self-expression and culture, not compromise it. The success of Ray-Ban Meta shows that when you merge iconic design with powerful technology, you create something we don’t just use, it’s something we live in.
Correction: This article was updated to describe Snap
s 2016 Specs as glasses that captured video, rather than AR glasses. (24/09/2025)
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