EssilorLuxottica and Meta reached a new milestone in their six-year-old partnership in September 2025 when they introduced the Meta Ray-Ban Display, their first smart glasses with an in-lens display, controlled via a bracelet that translates hand gestures into actions. The glasses offered capabilities like letting the wearer read text messages, see a transcription of what a speaker is saying or get turn-by-turn navigation. Just as important: They still look like regular glasses.

For more than a decade, tech companies promised that smart glasses would be the next breakthrough consumer device. They never connected with mainstream shoppers, however, because to make capabilities like a display possible, the glasses required bulky or awkward designs that weren’t what people wanted to wear on their faces.

Ray-Ban and Meta attacked the challenge head-on, focussing on design first. The second generation of their Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which didn’t offer full augmented reality but packaged audio, image capture and Meta’s AI into Ray-Ban’s classic frames, became a surprise hit, selling more than two million pairs since their launch in 2023.

That success has bolstered the companies’ confidence. Last year they announced a long-term extension of their partnership, and this year Meta bought a minority stake in EssilorLuxottica for $3.5 billion.

As EssilorLuxottica’s chief wearables officer, Rocco Basilico has worked to preserve the balance of form and function in the company’s collaboration with Meta, and believes what they’ve unveiled so far is just the beginning.

BoF: Tech companies have been trying to make smart glasses a commercial success for at least a decade. What did the Ray-Ban Meta glasses do that previous generations of smart glasses failed at?

Rocco Basilico: We started with design first, and we were very rigid in the partnership on not compromising on design. I think Meta appreciates this quality, that we were very firm that the Wayfarer needs to be a certain level of thickness or a certain weight. We said, if we don’t fit the technology into this frame, we will not have a product.

BoF: EssilorLuxottica has said it’s scaling production volume for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and mentioned on its July 2025 earnings call that sales grew more than 200 percent year over year. That’s still very fast growth. How big is the potential market here?

RB: We are at the beginning of something; it’s just starting. We said that we will be able to produce more than 20 million glasses, so the ambition is obviously very high. And because we have the opportunity to scale with different brands, I think that is key in accelerating adoption. We already see that a lot of new customers are buying Oakley. There are customers buying the Ray-Ban Meta that bought [Oakley’s] HSTN or Vanguard, but we saw more than 60 percent of new customers reaching out and discovering wearables through Oakley. It’s such an important metric because you understand that we are not selling to the same bucket of people. Now we are going through the list of our brands and understanding what is the right mix for wearables as a category. Sports obviously are very important. Then it’s important also to reach more women, so we have plans for that. We do it through style expansion, but at some point we will do it also from brand expansion.

I do think there’s something beautiful about intertwining technology with fashion.

BoF: Are you using the same strategy with the Meta Ray-Ban Display?

RB: You’re going to see a lot more. As you probably guessed, there is a lot of product strategy that goes behind this roadmap. The things that we’re going to release a year from now, or a year and a half, are planned now. We’re very fast between the decision-making of, ‘Ok, we’re going to do this,’ and the release date. We can be faster; it can be two years or even less, which is a very, very fast product cycle. So you’re going to see way more products coming down the pipeline starting in the next months, not even the next years. But the strategy goes much deeper than that. We have a multi-year partnership; we have a very strong three-year roadmap that we feel very proud of.

BoF: The Meta Ray-Ban Display only just went on sale, so it’s still very early, but can you say what the response has been so far?

RB: We sold out, then we replenished, and we are trying to keep up. But the first day that we launched in our stores, we sold out. We had queues all over. We had queues at LensCrafters at five in the morning in New York. It’s intentional that you have to go to the store to try the product, because you need to try the bracelet, you need to try the fitting of the frame. It’s a new technology. The volume driver will be still AI glasses in the short term, but I do see at some point this category of display glasses becoming more important. There are some unique features that you can only have through the glasses, and I do think there will be some crossover even in sports. I imagine being able to see your speed when you’re skiing, or your heart rate, or fewer display outputs.

BoF: Do you have a sense of which abilities offered by the display could become the most used?

RB: Texting, I would say, is the main one, and translation and caption. The thing that could be interesting, when you take a picture right now with the Ray-Ban Meta, you need to pull out your phone, look at it and then post it or send it to a friend. Now you avoid that step potentially. You can look at the picture [in the display] and send it directly to a friend. That’s already the direction of starting to leave a little bit your phone in your pocket. We started this journey with this idea to bring back people to live a little more in the moment, and I think AI glasses do this perfectly.

BoF: Could smart glasses eventually replace smartphones?

RB: It’s difficult to say. I’m a bit sceptical when people say things like that, because there is a lot of computing processing that you probably need your phone [for]. In the very long term, that maybe could be a possibility. I think it’s worth the shot, because we have been holding our phones for so many years now, which even has an impact on our posture. I do think that maybe there is an opportunity there to lift people up, having people looking straight ahead of them. I am optimistic that that could happen. I don’t see that happening in the next five years; 10 is a bit too far to say. But it’s not like the phone replaced the laptop completely. I think it will be more an integration of a bigger ecosystem of devices.

BoF: You have a product for the lifestyle customer and the sport customer. Could there be a product for a work customer, who’s using these glasses for business and day-to-day productivity?

RB: I think so. We have the tools really to do it, so we can be very specific, like a use case could be like a surgeon who needs to go in the clinics and do his daily tasks. There are a lot of people using the glasses already for this use case, but I do think that could be something to explore. I think at some point also, you could develop apps for specific use cases. In particular, with display glasses, I see the ecosystem opening up to different use cases and different platforms and apps.

BoF: Are there ways you expect the partnership between EssilorLuxotticaand Meta to evolve in the future?

RB: I think it will evolve with the product. It’s such new, uncharted territory that we’re exploring for the first time together. I think it’s a good thing if the partnership will change, but maintaining the skill set of who is doing what. In design, we can bring value and we can help them in really selling the product. They can bring value on the other end, on having the magic of technology and the investment that they did on R&D, for example, on the display glasses. The level of investment that goes into [it], it’s really only a big tech company can do it.

BoF: What advice would you give to a luxury or fashion brand that’s thinking about entering into technology and wearables?

RB: I think it’s key for a fashion brand to approach this path. I do think there’s something beautiful about intertwining technology with fashion. It’s very difficult to do it right, and expensive, to be honest, so venture when you’re ready. But I think it’s important. I do believe even for fashion, having some technical part of some IP, or something you can really own as a fashion brand, is key, because wearables are only going to increase and evolve. If I were a fashion brand starting now, let’s say, in my roadmap I would definitely put wearables.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This article first appeared in The State of Fashion 2026, an in-depth report on the global fashion industry, co-published by BoF and McKinsey & Company.