‘Surveillance Chic’: can Meta make its smart glasses a viable fashion accessory?
Efforts to bring AI glasses to a broader demographic via a partnership with Kylie Jenner appear to have backfired
Meta’s smart glasses, which allow users to record anything they see, have stirred debate since their release in 2023, including worries about privacy and covert surveillance. Civil society groups, government regulators and consumers have all raised concerns about the company’s plan to use facial-recognition software, as well as its tests of a prototype that could record video and audio of the wearer’s every moment.
Late last month, Meta made a bold move to change the perception of its AI-powered tech accessory by enlisting uber-influencer Kylie Jenner, who showed off a new, more stylish version of the glasses in sleek photos posted to her Instagram, where she has roughly 382mn followers. The glasses, which are called Starfire Kylie Edition and retail for £359, were co-designed by Jenner and were presented at an influencer-heavy event in New York.
With the launch, Meta is following a well-known playbook whereby tech gadgets appealing to a niche segment of the market are transformed, with the help of marketing, redesign and celebrity ambassadors, into fashionable lifestyle accessories sought after by a cross-section of shoppers.
In an interview with the fashion publication Glossy, Eva Chen, the vice-president of fashion at Meta, said that the glasses had previously “stood out to show you were wearing tech on your face”. Now, they come in 26 styles and are meant “to blend into and be a part of your personal style”.
The collaboration is also a way to deflect scrutiny, claims Catharina Doria, an AI ethicist and the founder of The AI Survival Club, a book club and community focused on critical AI literacy.
“What they’re trying to do is to minimise conversations about surveillance and being a technology that can be used for a lot of harm, and trying to make these Meta glasses look cool and fun,” Doria says. “When it’s a fashion statement, you don’t criticise the technology. You’re more focused on the looks than the content of it.”
“The other ones, they were ugly,” she continues. When people saw them, they automatically thought, “What’s the purpose of this, if not to record? You really focused on the action.” She adds that, with the new glasses, the focus is on “how cute it looks now that it has a little crystal on the side”.
But instead of sparking excitement, the launch has faced backlash. Commentators online dubbed the move “surveillance chic” and called the glasses creepy.
Influencers who, after the launch, touted the glasses on social media were met with commenters’ accusations of selling out and enabling “a surveillance state”. Diet Prada, a popular fashion insider account on Instagram, added its two cents with a carousel of tongue-in-cheek remarks, including one that described Meta’s glasses as “a more ‘stylish’ way for strangers to harass and record you in public”.
On her Substack, stylist and fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson called out guests at Meta’s launch event: “Insane how many of y’all let meta take pictures of you at their party wearing their newest covert cop cam sunnies! Fascism chic for summer!”
Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
Despite the controversy on the use and capabilities of smart glasses, Meta’s AI glasses, which it produces with EssilorLuxottica, sold 7mn units last year. Competition has also heightened since 2023, with Snap releasing a pair of augmented reality glasses last month and Google and Apple drawing up their own versions. Alibaba, Xiaomi, Huawei, Tencent and Baidu have also invested heavily in similar products.
In this context, and despite the initial backlash to the launch, 28-year-old Jenner, a member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, could give Meta a leg up. Her commercial influence has been proved time and time again — for example in 2018, when a social media post about her dissatisfaction with Snapchat was followed by a plunge in the company’s shares by as much as 8.4 per cent, or roughly $1.6bn of its market valuation.
“The Kardashian family defines what is cool and what is not,” Doria says. “Whatever they sell, sells in one second. They have the power to sway culture.”
Jenner is also an ideal ambassador for reaching new customers, especially women who have been targeted with the release of more stylish and wearable tech.
Companies have made a concerted push into fashion spaces in recent years. Yahoo, Apple and Instagram have all sponsored the Met Gala in the past decade. This May, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg both attended the glamorous annual fashion event in New York, and OpenAI, Meta and Amazon purchased tables, which start at $350,000.
Sarah Saska, a sociotechnologist and co-founder of Feminuity, a strategy consulting firm, explains that women are a major driving force in tech adoption.
“The dirty secret in Silicon Valley, in Big Tech writ large, any product, any new innovation doesn’t go mainstream and become normalised until it’s adopted by women”, Saska says.
“The iPod was just a gadget for music fiends until it became a fashion accessory,” she continues. The iPod silhouette campaign is a noteworthy example of technology breaking through to the masses by foregrounding coolness and lifestyle and removing tech specs in advertising.
“We see the same thing with fitness trackers,” Saska adds. “They entered the market as really nerdy hardware until they became branded as an aesthetic lifestyle that’s tied to wellness and even domesticity.”
She believes a similar “feminisation of AI” is under way. Campaigns to make AI more appealing to women by tying it to beauty, to motherhood, to wellness or lifestyle brands have multiplied alongside the rise in negative perceptions of AI in media, owing to its environmental costs, use in the military or job losses.
Critics including Saska and Doria believe that Meta’s use of Jenner’s image to appeal to a female audience is hypocritical, given that smart glasses have become a tool for capturing videos of unsuspecting women in public.
These videos, which are often posted to specialised social media accounts run by “manfluencers”, show women who have been filmed by male strangers without their permission while sunbathing, working out at the gym or standing on the street. The videos can attract millions of viewers along with derisive, offensive and inappropriate comments.
Though the glasses have a white LED light that switches on when recording, users have said it’s hard to see in daylight, and that it can be covered with a sticker so that many people, unaware such glasses even exist, simply do not notice it.
Janaya Walker, the interim director of the End Violence Against Women coalition, said in a statement that Meta’s collaboration with Jenner seemed calculated to appeal to the “same female audiences whose privacy and safety are undermined by the expansion of wearable technologies”.
Whether the risks to personal privacy will sway shoppers against buying AI glasses such as Meta’s remains to be seen. But Doria says that even people who believe they have nothing to hide should be wary. “Data companies are aggregating data to make life-altering decisions about your life, like if you can get credit to get a loan from a bank.”
At the end of the day, she says, “We all have the right to privacy.”