At the beginning of 2024, as big tech slashed its human workforce to fund the AI revolution, fashion romanticized the geek. The prior fall, Miu Miu models descended the catwalk in frumpy cardigans, gray hoodies, and chunky frames, wearing their hair disheveled as if they’d pulled an all-nighter at the library. “I have always been driven by the idea of understanding how women deal with the interaction between vanity and thought,” remarked Miuccia Prada, the brand’s namesake and visionary. Prescription glasses became fashion’s hottest accessory. “It” girls started to look like librarians, or more relevantly, start-up founders. Uncool was cool. This was supposedly a good thing: “In a period in which it’s easy to succumb to the pressures of adopting every micro-trend or the aspiration to curate an immaculate image on social media, this aesthetic offers women the opportunity to opt out of the illusion of perfection,” praised one Who What Wear writer.
If only. “Geek chic” wasn’t liberation from the social-media rat race, just a deceptive new manifestation of it. (Tellingly, the faces of the aesthetic were mostly supermodels like Bella Hadid.) In the years since, our image-conscious culture has grown only more extreme, giving rise to looksmaxxing and the normalization of treatments like peptides and GLP-1s. At the same time, appearing smart has become even more aspirational. In April, Vogue heralded the rise of the “intellectual influencer,” one who shares content “rooted in their expertise, hyperfixations, knowledge, or insights on a specific subject, rather than their looks or style.” (Listed examples include a Substack writer and the podcaster Jay Shetty.) TikTokers advise their audiences on how to be “disgustingly educated”; pop stars now open libraries and curate film series. Last month, Prada and the cult South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster debuted a limited-edition glasses collection with a book-themed campaign that features Japanese actor Kentaro Sakaguchi reciting a poem in a lecture hall.
This is a convenient public distraction for the true geeks — tech broligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman — who are busy colonizing our reality. They’ve captured us on their platforms, engineering algorithms for maximum addictiveness — facts and ethics be damned — and hollowed out countervailing institutions like journalism and academia. (Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Grok AI spat out nonconsensual sexualized deep fakes of real women, including minors; when emailed for comment, XAI replied with the message, “Legacy Media Lies.”) In a quest for AI domination, they have strip-mined the intellectual commons, automated workers out of jobs, and commandeered local water supplies.
Now, big tech is literally coming for our retinas with AI-powered smart glasses through which it will attain a total view of our lives. Backlash to its agenda has necessitated it market these wearables as stylish and empowering lifestyle accessories, not disruptive new tech products. It is doing so with the help of a desperate fashion industry that has already glamorized glasses, reduced to selling the illusion of agency in an attention economy over which it has little authority. (Prada and Gentle Monster are collaborating with Meta and Google on AI smart glasses, respectively.)