The smart glasses race has, until now, been a one-horse show. Meta and Ray-Ban have sold over seven million pairs of their AI glasses in 2025 alone — a number that more than tripled year-on-year and effectively turned a niche gadget into a category. The Wayfarers worked because they looked like Wayfarers first and a piece of tech second. Everyone else — Snap, the ghost of Google Glass, every Kickstarter dream in between — kept losing the same way: by forgetting that people have to put these things on their face.
So when Google walked back onto the stage at I/O 2026 with a new pair of smart glasses, the question wasn't really what can they do. We know what they can do. Gemini, cameras, turn-by-turn directions, real-time translation, the works. The question was: who designed them, and would anyone be caught dead in them?
The answer, somehow, is Gentle Monster!
If you've been to Seoul, or any street in Bandra that thinks it's been to Seoul, you know the brand. Gentle Monster is the Korean eyewear label that turned sunglasses into sculpture — oversized, architectural, deliberately strange. Their stores look like art installations because they basically are. Blackpink wears them. Beyoncé wears them.
These are not the people you call when you want to make a tech gadget, which is exactly why Google and Samsung called them.
The first glimpse — shot by Carlijn Jacobs, the photographer behind some of the more interesting Vogue covers of the last few years — shows a pair that looks like classic Gentle Monster: sculptural, confident, a little bit alien. There's no visible seam where the technology lives and no chunky temple arm either. They look like sunglasses you'd buy at the Gentle Monster store in Hongdae. And I guess that's the trick and the whole game.
There's a second pair too, made with Warby Parker, which handles the other half of the market — clean, classic, prescription-friendly, the optical equivalent of a navy crewneck. It’s more sensible and adult.
Both of them run on Android XR, and are powered by Gemini, both are what Google is calling "audio glasses" — meaning they talk to you through speakers in the temples. That part comes later, in a separate pair Google is still cooking. For now, the pitch is: tap the side of the frame, ask Gemini something, get an answer in your ear. Ask about the restaurant you're walking past. Get directions without staring at your phone. Have it summarise your texts, or have it order your coffee on DoorDash while your hands stay in your pockets. You can look at a menu in Italian and hear it back in English, with the original speaker's tone preserved. Or, you can tell it to take a photo and remove the tourist behind you, courtesy of Nano Banana.
This is the same checklist Meta has been running for a year, and they work.
And that's where this gets interesting. Meta cracked the design problem by handing the form factor entirely to Ray-Ban — eight decades of eyewear credibility doing the heavy lifting while Meta worked on the silicon. Google, having learned its lesson from the 2013 Google Glass disaster (a device that became a slur — "glasshole" — before it became a product), is doing the same thing, but louder. Ray-Ban gives you legitimacy. Gentle Monster gives you a look. There's a difference. One says I'm a normal person who happens to have a camera on my face. The other says I chose this.
It's a smart bet. The smart glasses category isn't going to be won by whoever ships the best AI — that gap is closing fast. It'll be won by whoever makes the pair you actually want to wear to dinner. Meta figured that out first. Google, second time around, seems to have finally figured it out too.
The first collections drop this fall in select markets. India is, predictably, not on the list yet — but with Samsung in the driver's seat on hardware and Gentle Monster already a known quantity in Indian metro fashion circles, the wait probably won't be a long one.
Whether the Gemini side of things holds up against Meta AI in the real world is a question for the reviews. Whether you'll want to put these on your face is, looking at the first images, already answered.