It’s been a while since we heard a fashion brand call itself a tech company. Such headlines disappeared around the same time that brands’ priorities shifted away from experiments with new tech, like Web3, and back to the bottom line. But when your sights are set on going to space, technical performance is going to play a significant role.
“We’re a technology company, no doubt about it,” Oakley’s global president, Caio Amato, tells Vogue Business in an interview. “Our offices are full of scientists; what we do is science wrapped in art. Technological research and development are at the foundation of everything we do.”
Amato is speaking from the brand’s head office in Southern California, which the company has dubbed its “interplanetary HQ”. The building looks more like a futuristic bunker from the set of a 1960s space movie than it does an eyewear brand’s HQ. Travis Scott (the brand’s recently appointed “chief visionary”) is performing for the brand’s 50th birthday party that evening. Amato shows off various R&D and product testing rooms, including where the brand is developing a space visor for the next crewed mission to the moon.
“We’re here to push the boundaries of innovation and sports — everything we do is based on solving problems and amplifying human potential,” he says. “We’re a technology company first, and then aesthetics follow.”
This mindset has been influenced by the many moves Oakley has made lately. This month, it partnered with London’s Institute of Digital Fashion to select five emerging designers and artists using cutting-edge technology in their practices for the ‘Oakley Future 5 Future Innovation Lab’ incubator programme, geared towards developing new eyewear, apparel, footwear and accessories that are “designed for 2075 and delivered to 2025”.
It’s also announced a string of carefully orchestrated product drops and collaborations in 2025 to honour the brand’s 50th anniversary — from designing a space visor with Axiom and Prada to launching smart glasses with Meta.
“This is by far the most innovative year that Oakley has ever had,” Amato says, teasing two more “big innovations” that the brand is announcing in 2025.
One is the September launch of Oakley’s new “Stunt Devil” sports sunglasses, Amato reveals. The glasses are refined with over 500 miles of athlete testing, and designed to never fall off athletes’ faces. They’re moulded to the wearer’s head without added pressure, thanks to what the brand is calling its new “HyperGrip Ultra technology”, where the glasses’ temples mimic “the natural grip and structure of frog feet”.
Amato also teases the final, and seventh, new product innovation to be announced this year, saying: “We’re creating a product, the Flow Scape goggles, for the Winter Olympics that improves field of view by 60 per cent compared to our previous model — goggles that you’ll put on your face, you’ll go to take a shower, and you’ll forget you’re even wearing them.
“We lose money because we’re authentic”
It’s been two years since the brand’s Salomon-esque renaissance, when its footwear, accessories and sunglasses — with their action movie model names, moulded wraparound styles and brightly coloured frames — went from cycle bro stalwart to a beneficiary of the gorpcore trend.
EssilorLuxottica, Oakley’s parent company, does not disclose sales figures for its individual brands. But a spokesperson for the company tells Vogue Business that it’s experienced four consecutive years of revenue growth. Consumers in EMEA and APAC are driving the brand’s global expansion, and Oakley has experienced enough demand to expand its bricks-and-mortar presence across Europe: its latest flagship store opened in Milan in May this year, with an “experiential” design that takes inspiration from Oakley’s California HQ, echoing a futuristic brutalist bunker.
Meanwhile, Oakley’s stock is capturing more and more of the fashion and streetwear crowds’ attention and being worn by celebrities abound — from world-class athletes like World Cup winner Kylian Mbappé and three-time Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes, to musicians and models like Billie Eilish, Addison Rae, Kylie Jenner and Bella Hadid. These female celebrities reflect the brand’s shift from a pure sports performance brand to a brand that, in the gorpcore era, has gained universal cool. Oakley’s best-selling items are its High Wrap and Eye Jacket Redux sunglasses — both among its more subtle frame designs that look more Y2K streetwear than they do track and field.
But Amato says Oakley is not trend-driven, and its core approach hasn’t changed in 50 years.
“We lose money because we’re authentic,” Amato says. “There are other brands out there designing shades that become popular, and we could easily copy the aesthetics to make money. But instead we design products that solve real performance problems: we build for the future and we’re very proud of that.”
Oakley doesn’t have a dedicated tech team, but Amato says a “very big part of the organisation” makes up the R&D and product engineering teams, who are dedicated to finding the best tech out there for specific sports performance use cases. Half of these product people spend their time talking to athletes and scientists to identify the biggest technical problems in sports. Amato cites examples like surfers’ reluctance to wear helmets because of their weight and disorienting effects in the water, which lead to the brand designing its new WTR Icon helmet that is lighter than existing models, has open ventilation to prevent disorientation and drag in the water, and gives surfers optional ear protection so they can stay sensitive to their surroundings.
For cyclists, Oakley’s OG customer, the brand is constantly working with athletes to develop head gear (helmets and sunglasses) that can withstand higher speeds and g-force winds: its R&D team tested its recently released Velo Kato and Velo Mach head systems on both IRL athletes and by 3D printing full-scale models to log thousands of trials in its wind tunnel simulator.
“There’s a lot of tension there because sometimes the solution requires something that doesn’t exist,” Amato says.
“Usually, the ideas that we bring to the table don’t have the machines to make them, so we build the machines to deliver the designs as well as the designs themselves.”
"Athletic intelligence” with Meta and more Prada collabs down the line
Of all Oakley’s future-facing product announcements, nothing could get more tech than its collaboration with Meta to develop a new line of “performance AI” smart glasses, which the brands announced last month. The sports-focused sunglasses, which became available on preorder last week, enable wearers to capture 3K video with a built-in camera, listen to music, and interact with Meta AI.
“At Oakley, we don’t call it artificial intelligence, we call it athletic intelligence,” Amato says. “For us, the tech doesn’t mean shit if it’s not well-driven or well-worn. What we’re building with Meta are tools to amplify human sporting potential,” he adds.
As Meta digs its claws further into its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, Oakley is the second portfolio brand that the tech giant has chosen to collaborate with, after its Ray-Ban partnership that began in 2021.
But despite viewing Oakley as a tech company, Amato says the partnership doesn’t feel like a meeting of two tech minds. He’s aware of the Oakley design and brand clout that Meta is after.
“When we sit at the table with Meta, it feels like two complementary organisations: Oakley brings our design capabilities and a lot of our swag to the table, and Meta brings the engineering part of the hardware per se,” he says.
Although the AI and camera capabilities are core parts of the new tech, Oakley has been experimenting with embedding music-playing capabilities within its designs for over 20 years. The Meta announcement comes 21 years after Oakley launched its Oakley Thump sunglasses in 2004, which came with an in-built MP3 player for athletes to listen to music on the move. This is all part of what Amato says has been Oakley’s dream for several years.
“We’ve long held a vision of enabling people to capture things as they play sports without having to stop playing. But my ultimate dream in future is to enable connection between athletes in a way that’s never been done before,” Amato says, pitching his future vision of Oakley glasses enabling people to play sports together without being in the same location.
And as for Oakley’s first foray into space with last week’s space visor launch, Amato says that the brand will continue designing optical solutions for space “because they help us build solutions for Earth”.
Oakley’s space visor was designed in collaboration with Axiom Space and will accompany the spacesuit that Prada has co-designed with Axiom for the 2027 Artemis III mission to the moon. Prada is also a licensee of Oakley’s parent company, EssilorLuxottica, and the space project is the first time that the two companies have coordinated their design efforts. As for what the future holds, Amato tells Vogue Business we can expect to see further collaborations down the line.
”You can expect us working more and more together, joining forces with Prada to create more solutions,” Amato says.
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