French luxury group Kering announced it’s working with Google to bring Gucci-branded smart glasses to market sometime next year, potentially becoming the segment’s first luxury brand.
Kering, which also owns a host of brands including Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Bottega Veneta, has been working to revive Gucci following a sharp decline in revenue—roughly 19–22% in 2025 alone—which also prompted the company to fire Gucci creative director Sabato De Sarno.
Gucci’s new strategy marks a return to classic designs as well as increased investment in eyewear and jewelry, a smaller segment which actually grew amid Gucci’s downward trajectory.
Speaking to Reuters, Kering CEO Luca de Meo also revealed the Gucci parent company is now working with Google to release a pair of smart glasses, noting that a pair could launch “[p]robably next year, 2027.”
Notably, this would put Kering in more direct competition with EssilorLuxottica, which extended a multi-year partnership to 2030 with Meta to produce Oakley and Ray-Ban smart glasses.
And business has been good. EssilorLuxxottica announced in February it sold over seven million smart glasses in 2025, effectively tripling lifetime smart glasses revenue since the release of Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) smart glasses in 2023.
Granted, that revenue bump accounted for multiple frame styles, including a hardware refresh of its popular Ray-Ban Meta glasses (Gen 2), Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and its $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, the first to include a heads-up display.
With the addition of Gucci, it could potentially allow Google’s Android XR operating system to cover a much wider price range than either Meta or Apple, the latter of which is reportedly preparing a number of smart glasses styles for release in late 2026 or early 2027.
Google is also slated to release smart glasses frames from Gentle Monster and US-based eyewear brand Warby Parker, as well as Samsung, all of which are expected to release sometime this year.
