Smack in the middle of the Fifth Avenue shopping promenade that stretches from the Bergdorf Goodman-Louis Vuitton-Tiffany nexus to Saks Fifth Avenue, past Prada and Dolce & Gabbana and next door to Harry Winston, lies a new 15,000-square-foot emporium.
Bright blue on the outside, multiple stories high and featuring a wall of 40 different sunglasses at the entrance, a number of full-length mirrors and even a mini-cafe on the second floor, it is a flagship store like many of the nearby flagship stores. Except for one thing: The name on the door is not a clothing brand or a jewelry brand or a watch brand.
It’s Meta. (Yes, as in the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.) Last week, a mere month after Mark Zuckerberg made waves by sitting in the front row at the Prada fashion show, the company announced that it had signed a 10-year lease for the space, turning its holiday pop-up shop into a Fifth Avenue fixture. The on-off fashion-tech love affair, which has been percolating in some form or another since 2015, is once again picking up steam.
Think of it as the third wave.
“As tech has become mainstream, it has realized it is integrating into pop culture,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the investment firm Menlo Ventures. “And there is nothing more popular than high fashion.”
Scott Galloway, the tech pundit, podcaster and venture capitalist, called it “an exchange of value.”
“Tech has too much money and too little cool,” he said. “Fashion has too much cool and too little money.” They are effectively making a trade, of sorts.
It includes the return of wearables in the form of smart glasses, led by Meta’s partnership with EssilorLuxottica, in which various tech features have been incorporated into classic Oakley and Ray-Ban styles, and which have been an unexpected hit (unlike the company’s aborted foray into the Metaverse). According to EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley, more than seven million pairs were sold last year, triple the sales of 2023 and 2024 combined, and McKinsey’s 2025 State of Fashion report predicts that smart frames will “redefine the wearables landscape in 2026,” with analysts expecting overall sales of smart glasses to quadruple.
Meta, which may also introduce Prada frames, isn’t alone in teaming up with existing fashion brands to leverage their design skills when it comes to glasses: Google has invested in partnerships with Kering (the parent company of Saint Laurent, Gucci and Balenciaga), Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, all of which are planning to introduce smart glasses this year.
Elsewhere in the fashion world, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, are honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. And the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, has teamed up with the former Apple design guru Jony Ive, himself a Met Gala regular and former co-host, to create the first OpenAI product, reportedly being unveiled this year. Though the whatever-it-is is being kept tightly under wraps, its creators have begun to drop some hints about its … well, vibe.
“Peace,” “calm” and “joy” are all words they have used, tapping into the emotions they hope to evoke rather than any functional or utilitarian purpose, a strategic approach to stuff taken straight from the fashion world. It all goes with the makeovers so many of the Silicon Valley execs seem to be experiencing, tossing their Tevas and hoodies in favor of Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana, which Mr. Ganesan called “the new go-to stores of the tech elite.”
There hasn’t been this much mutual appreciation since Apple unveiled its watch back in 2015, heralding the second wearables era after the somewhat awkward introduction of Google Glass on the Diane von Furstenberg runway back in 2012.
That never took off — it was, in fact, roundly mocked — but nevertheless, Apple followed a similar playbook, with various events during Paris Fashion Week. Then it raised the stakes still further, hooking up with Hermès for a set of watch bands, starting a wearables kerfuffle that gave rise to a brief flurry of smart cuffs and related jewelry that proved less than alluring to the general public. Cue a pivot away from fashion and toward wellness. At least until now.
Whether the renewed fashion-tech liaison will work this time around remains to be seen. Mr. Galloway called it an “expensive midlife crisis” for the Silicon Valley set. But at least there is more understanding in the tech world that, as Gemma D’Auria, the global leader of McKinsey’s fashion, luxury and specialty retail practice, said, “these technologies need to integrate into fashion and not the other way around.”
Witness the fact that Matt Jacobson, Meta’s vice president and creative director of wearables, said that the company chose its New York store location — their second shop, after one in Los Angeles, with more planned to roll out this year — precisely because it was “the 50-yard line of the greatest shopping street in the world.”
One that put Meta smack in the middle of “brands that shape the cultural zeitgeist,” Mr. Jacobson said.
The store also serves to humanize a company at a moment when it has been making headlines for laying off 700 employees, not to mention being sued for allegations about the addictive nature of its mysterious social media algorithms. A store, after all, with products you can try on, a service that will customize your glasses case and a cafe where you can simply hang out, offers a seductively, maybe deceptively, human sort of experience.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the Meta Lab was humming with casual browsers. Two couples came in toting small orange Louis Vuitton shopping bags from the luxury boutique up the street. A pair of students at the Fashion Institute of Technology, one from Wisconsin, one from Korea, were testing out the Oakleys; an older man trying the Ray-Bans was asking the Meta A.I. assistant how the Dow had performed that day. Upstairs in the cafe, a family from Mexico was having coffee and waiting for the cases of their new glasses to be customized
“At the end of the day, fashion is about aesthetics and beauty, but also about signals,” Mr. Ganesan said. “And right now, the glasses, the store on Fifth, showing up at the Met Gala, these signal to the wider world: We are here. We are making an effort to meet you where you are.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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