Big Tech has spent the last 12 months making steady inroads into fashion, and Vogue Business has been clocking every move. So it came as little surprise when last week Meta revealed a Kylie Jenner-fronted campaign for its latest AI smart glasses line, a wider range of 26 new Meta Glasses styles and one pair co-designed with Jenner herself. Like its existing Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley smart glasses lines, the new designs are developed with EssilorLuxxottica — the group that also owns Prada eyewear, rumored to be Meta’s next collaborator.
Snap released its second attempt at smart glasses, the new $2,195 AI and AR-powered Specs glasses, just a week earlier, and Google unveiled the first designs of its upcoming Intelligent Eyewear AI smart glasses a fortnight before that, so it was high time the spotlight swung back to smart glasses incumbent Meta, which first launched its version back in 2021.
“The campaign landed at the exact moment people were primed to question its motives — fashion and celebrity amplified the scrutiny instead of softening it,” Saska says. “People, namely women, saw it for what it was: an attempt to reshape the product’s cultural meaning.”
Surveillance isn’t sexy
Yes, we already live in a world of constant smartphone recording. But what smart glasses remove is the social cue of lifting a phone — a small gesture that tells everyone else they’re on-camera.
While both Meta and Snap’s glasses feature a small LED light that flashes white when the wearer takes a photo and stays steadily lit when the wearer records a video, users have found hacks for bypassing this design on Meta’s — from timed finger-covering tricks during camera startup that are shared on Reddit forums, to third-party camera covers and tinting stickers you can buy on Amazon and Ebay.
When asked how Meta is tackling these privacy controversies, a spokesperson for the company told Vogue Business: “We have teams dedicated to limiting and combating misuse, but as with any technology, the onus is ultimately on the individual to not actively exploit it.” They added that Meta’s dedicated privacy teams are working on disallowing users to capture content when attempting to cover or damage the LED light, and that Meta is “constantly evolving the tamper detection technology”. A spokesperson for Snap responded to questions about the Snap glasses’ in-built privacy safeguards by also pointing to the LED light that pulses continuously during audio and video recording, and flashes for photo capture; “Users explicitly approve access to sensitive sensors like the camera and microphone, and Specs use clear visual indicators whenever media is being captured or shared,” they added. Google did not respond to requests for comment on the privacy features of its smart glasses, which will be released in the fall.
But privacy experts say this format puts the burden on citizens to be on the lookout for a light. Meanwhile, there have been several reports of people who say they’ve been filmed without their consent by AI glasses wearers — and unsurprisingly, they are predominantly women.
“The immediate risks are covert and sexualized recording, filming people in vulnerable moments, capturing children, harassment, stalking, and footage that can fuel extortion or deepfakes. The ‘creep’ framing is provocative, and it points to something real,” says Saska. “But I worry that it shrinks the problem to one creep on a train taking a picture, when the structural danger is always-on cameras becoming ordinary, human workers reviewing footage, and data pooling in an ecosystem owned by one company. Once that hardware sits on millions of faces, it becomes infrastructure that police, immigration agencies, employers, and the company itself can draw on. The creep is one manifestation of a much larger system.”
Fashion commentators have pointed to Meta’s choice of Jenner as an efficient legitimacy engine for reaching young women and fashion and beauty consumers. Where early adopters of any AI wearable, from Oura rings to Meta’s smart glasses, were predominantly Silicon Valley tech bros, tech companies have had to change tack to reach female consumers and rewire their images away from purely for the bros. It’s a trend that runs through consumer tech history: devices rarely go mainstream until women adopt them, from Facebook’s transition from college side project into social infrastructure, to fitness trackers that began as nerdy hardware but have since rebranded to wellness tools with women’s health capabilities.
But sociologists like Saska say the strategy runs deeper, and that it’s a clear example of the feminization of AI: the use of women, femininity, and beauty culture to make a contested technology feel safe, intimate, and desirable. Saska says that her research found that the more politically controversial AI becomes, the more aggressively it’s feminized.
“As tech draws backlash over surveillance, labor displacement, environmental costs, and military use, companies reframe it through beauty, motherhood, wellness, and lifestyle,” she says, pointing to another added layer — the fact that Jenner’s voice is integrated into the new glasses as the voice for Meta’s AI assistant anthropomorphizes the device, via a camera that greets you in a familiar feminine voice.
This framing doesn’t negate concerns about consent. “Does a small light on the glasses amount to asking for consent? I don’t think so, which arguably means they violate the GDPR,” says Carissa Véliz, associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University’s Institute for Ethics.
This has big implications for fashion brands weighing partnerships on AI eyewear. As with most applications of AI, the law is yet to catch up with the tech — there are almost no laws written specifically for AI smart glasses. Instead, they’re governed by a patchwork of existing laws on photography, audio recording, privacy, data protection and biometrics, and those laws were largely written with smartphones and CCTV in mind, not always-on AI wearables. In the EU, it’s not illegal to own or wear camera-equipped smart glasses, but as Veliz points out, the legal questions arise when they collect and process personal data. Under GDPR, if identifiable people are recorded and that footage is processed, stored or used to train AI, the controller must have a lawful basis, provide transparency, and comply with data protection requirements.
Smart glasses are treated much like any other camera, but AI complicates things, because footage may be uploaded, analyzed, transcribed, or used to improve models. That’s why Meta’s AI glasses have attracted scrutiny from European regulators, following reports about human review of footage. When asked about whether these reports are accurate, a spokesperson for Meta said: “When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
In response to questions about whether Meta is developing facial recognition technology to incorporate into its smart glasses, the spokesperson added: “We’ve been transparent that we’re exploring these types of features,” and that if the company does roll out facial recognition features to customers, it will “take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency”. A spokesperson for Snap said that its upcoming Specs release will not use facial recognition, and that the company “prioritizes on-device processing wherever possible” by demanding explicit permission to access the in-built camera and microphone, running the Snap Lenses apps in “isolated environments with limited permissions”, and that users “have controls over what information is stored, shared, and deleted.” Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, in the US, while there are no federal laws specifically regulating smart glasses, they also fall under existing laws governing video recording, audio recording (under wiretapping and eavesdropping laws), biometric privacy laws, and state privacy statutes. It varies from state to state whether recording audio on the glasses requires one-party or all-party consent, for example. So the biggest legal questions largely don’t center on the glasses themselves, but on what happens to the data they capture.
“The glasses put the burden on citizens to be on the lookout and run outside the purview of the camera or cover their faces,” says Véliz, who points out citizens’ rights in this situation. “But it’s not always possible to protect oneself. It makes the default surveillance and puts the onus on non-wearers of glasses to protect themselves.”
And where smart glasses are generally legal under the same frameworks as smartphones, they occupy a gray space between what the law permits and what society deems acceptable. Existing recording laws assume visible acts of recording, but smart glasses remove many of those social cues, making consent and awareness much harder in practice.
For fashion brands that collaborate with tech companies on AI hardware design and branding, this means the risks are twofold: regulatory scrutiny is intensifying around the world, at the same time as consumer scrutiny. Experts warn they could soon be navigating a fast-evolving web of GDPR obligations, state recording laws, and biometric privacy rules, as well as the reputational risks that come with embracing yet-to-be-regulated recording devices.
Is no camera the solution?
Where most of the consumer backlash to smart glasses centers on their integrated cameras, challenger smart glasses brand Even Realities is taking a different approach. Its AI glasses forgo cameras altogether in a bid to prioritize privacy, instead using a transparent heads-up display to deliver the other capabilities of Meta and Snap’s glasses, like AI-powered translation, navigation, notifications, and note-taking. The company also sells a wearable health tracker ring to accompany the glasses, so wearers can track their health data in the in-lens display, too.
It’s an alternative proposition that’s won big investor backing: Even Realities just closed a $150 million pre-Series B funding round led by Chinese megafunds Meituan and Tencent at a $1 billion valuation. When Vogue Business speaks to Even Realities CEO Will Wang, he’s on a fundraising roadshow meeting North American and European investors ahead of its Series B proper, which he says will close by the end of 2026, at threefold the valuation of the latest round.
Rather than focusing on ambient data collection via in-built cameras like smart glasses rivals Meta, Google and Snap, Wang is convinced that the capability that will make AI smart glasses reach mass adoption is an interface of useful software that consumers can access via optical display. For now, he’s focused on building out productivity features via an app network for the glasses, rather than a camera that can pin glasses to the physical world. The glasses do have a microphone for users to activate Even Realities’s AI assistant, but wearers can’t take calls with the glasses and Wang says there’s no way to record people’s voices and save them off the device.
“A camera for us is a no-go, until laws exist where we feel like the world has found a way to coexist with cameras on faces, which we very much don’t have now,” Wang says. “And yes, there’s a microphone on the glasses, but there’s a microphone everywhere now. You can record someone easily on your phone with a microphone, but we still feel like we don’t want to enable any way of recording people’s voices — that would be giving people a reason to feel uncomfortable about our glasses, which is exactly what we don’t want.”
These privacy-first features mean that a large part of the customers buying Even Realities’s glasses, which start at $599, are high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and those in the political or public sphere. Wang expects 2026 revenues to be “in the hundreds of millions of dollars”. Now, the Chinese company is hoping to grow further in Europe and North America, capitalizing on its privacy-first USP. Rather than partnering with fashion-adjacent celebrities, Wang says Even Realities has collaborated with alternatively influential figures who are well known in their specific fields — from the USA’s deaf swimming team, who he says use the glasses to aid communication, to leadership thinker and CEO David Fiorucci.
Where Wang says Even Realities has kept a relatively low profile since founding in 2023, its new funding and customer acquisition push could be well-timed to the growing consumer backlash against camera-powered rivals. Doing so is no mean feat — the Big Tech giants it’s up against have a huge brand awareness advantage.
But Even Realities does still rely on some cloud processing for advanced AI features, meaning voice queries and related data may be transmitted to external AI services like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Privacy experts warn that camera-free doesn’t necessarily equate to surveillance-free. “Safety depends on the whole system, and the updates that can change what a device does overnight. Something that looks private today can stop being private after a single update,” says Saska, who argues that the focus needs to move from privacy-first hardware to privacy-first governance that determines whether AI products continue to respect people’s rights as the tech, software, and business model change.
For that to happen, as Véliz argues, culture has a crucial role to play. For now, the backlash surrounding the latest AI smart glasses underscores a stubborn consumer perception problem: fashion may be able to lend desirability, but it can’t overcome distrust on its own.
“The line I’d draw is between acceptable and safe. Making something feel normal doesn’t remove the harm, it just quiets the questions we should be asking,” says Saska. “This isn’t only a hardware competition anymore; it’s a cultural one, and fashion can’t solve a legitimacy problem.”
