Long before today’s tech giants forced their way into co-chairing the Met Gala, Google co-founder Sergey Brin positioned himself in the front row of Diane Von Furstenberg’s 2013 spring show, sporting an early prototype of what would be known as Google Glass. Von Furstenberg herself donned a pair of the wearable smartglasses as she directed models, some also wearing Google Glass, down the runway. It seemed like a promising partnership between a powerful tech company and the woman who popularized the iconic wrap dress.

Yet despite the celebrity-packed promotions, generous Vogue spreads, and proclamations of one of the “Best Inventions of the Year,” Google Glass infamously flopped. It turns out there wasn’t much clamoring for clunky lenses that did little more than take photos and send alerts of incoming text messages. Which is to say nothing about the intense privacy concerns the technology appeared to present.

In pushing AI technology, the Meta-Jenner partnership reads like a poor misreading of our cultural moment, as well as a willful disregard of just how badly Google Glass pissed off people a decade prior.

It was around this time........

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