Less than a month after Mark Zuckerberg made a fashion week cameo on Prada’s front row in Milan, Meta has crept back into the fashion conversation. But this time, it’s because the tech company just signed a 10-year lease for its first New York flagship store on the city’s Fifth Avenue. The five-level 15,000-square-foot townhouse is nestled between the likes of Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Dior on Millionaires’ Row — a strategic choice to position itself among the brands that “define culture”, according to the company.
Meta has occupied the space since November last year, when it launched a short-term pop-up, but the extension to a new 10-year lease marks its second permanent flagship store, after its Meta Lab LA flagship opened in October last year. It’s all part of the tech company’s plan to double down on experiential retail in 2026, to build aspirational value around the brand and its AI glasses, according to Meta’s VP and creative director of wearables Matt Jacobson.
“We’re going to settle in and are looking to open eight to 10 more stores this year. First, in the US, but we’re now starting to consider international expansion, as well,” Jacobson tells Vogue. “We are moving fast and it will all be based around this experiential idea. They’re not just places to sell glasses. They’re really spaces to celebrate community, creativity, and self-expression.”
Meta’s new NYC flagship is the latest in a string of offline strategies from the very companies behind the technology that enables consumers to spend more time online. As consumer tech hardware becomes increasingly commoditized and AI features converge, tech brands are realizing that in order to differentiate, they must shift from product marketing to world-building, repositioning themselves as lifestyle players.
“Tech brands are borrowing from fashion because fashion wrote the playbook on selling identity, not just utility,” says Ted Wallace-Williams, creative technology director at R/GA. He points out that when every LLM can summarize your emails and every smartphone can take a great photo, the product alone stops being the USP. “What differentiates is what it means to choose one over another. That’s fashion’s entire operating model.”
It’s certainly not the first time tech has looked to fashion to build cultural cachet — the two industries have been circling each other for years. Google Glass collaborations with Diane Von Furstenberg, and Apple Watch tie-ups with Hermès and Nike were born over a decade ago, for example, to varying degrees of success. But this time around, tech brands are going deeper than collaborations and runway stunts. They’re mimicking luxury brands’ world-building strategies by becoming brand storytellers in their own right, building IRL experiences and poaching fashion talent to pull the industry’s cultural toolkit into their own.
“Tech brands are not copying fashion purely for the aesthetics,” Wallace-Williams says. “They’re copying fashion because they’ve arrived at the same strategic problem: how do you create preference between functionally similar products?”
Intangible tech, tangible experiences
As luxury and sportswear players double down on IRL events and experiential retail to build brand loyalty among consumers craving an “unplugged” connection, tech brands are following suit. Through its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, Meta already sells its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses in 30,000 EssilorLuxottica-managed eyewear retailers worldwide. It didn’t need to open stores to sell its glasses and showcase their product specs, or to choose one of the most luxurious retail flagship locations in the world. And its original business model was also built upon digitalizing human connection, via facdbook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. But the decision was driven by Meta’s goal for its smart glasses to become “aspirational yet accessible” enough to reach widespread adoption, via community, and cultural relevance, Jacobson says.
“Placing our flagship store alongside the brands that help define culture will distinguish Meta Lab from traditional consumer electronics retail,” he says. “It’s all about community. To open another eyeglass store didn’t make sense for us, we needed to do it differently.” A visit to Meta’s New York store will yield free coffee and cookies baked by a skate shop in Brooklyn, in keeping with the storewide theme around New York skate culture from 1960 to today, he says. “We’re not rushing you in and out, it’s not about efficiency. We really want our Meta Labs to be a place you want to come in, hang out, and spend time.” Skate-themed ephemera, a 3D-printing station to ‘tag’ your glasses case with a custom design, and full-length mirrors to try on glasses in the context of outfits are among other key features. Sales assistants are also on hand, showing customers how they can ask Meta’s AI glasses questions about the skate communities referenced around the store.
The store location and hands-on clienteling make a visit to the store feel more akin to the experience of a high-end luxury brand, Matt Maher, founder and CEO of fashion-tech consultancy M7 Innovations, says. “I’ll be honest, it was a bit surreal walking through Meta’s Fifth Avenue flagship,” says Maher, adding that the store was “hilariously overstaffed” in a way that “paralleled a luxury experience”.
“Websites, social pages, and all-digital touchpoints are ancillary compliments to the IRL experience, never a replacement,” Maher says. “Meta is trying to reverse engineer being a digitally native platform to one that can also provide memorable, exclusive, and Instagrammable moments in-person.”
Headphone and smartphone maker Nothing is also ramping up its physical retail presence, opening a second flagship store in Bengaluru, India, last month. The two-floor space has been designed as an experiential hub, with a content studio for creators, a café, a community hangout zone, and in-store product customization, sharing many of the same tactics as Meta. As well as planning further store expansion in New York and Tokyo soon, the brand has leaned heavily on physical activations in the last few weeks to platform the launch of its Nothing Phone (4a) and Headphone (a), with pop-ups and launch events attended by fashion influencers, editors, and DJs, which have been filmed and shared as content on these cultural figures’ social profiles.
Seeded collaborations with creators have been content-first, and Nothing’s Instagram grid currently features a combination of fashion-style photography showcasing the products, as well as short videos grounded in internet humor, with celebrity lookalikes cast to replicate the likes of Elton John rather than celebrity endorsements themselves. The campaign feels more like a fashion brand casting a cultural moment, rather than a tech brand paying influencers and celebrities to build cultural clout. This is no coincidence, given that new chief brand officer Charlie Smith was brought in from Loewe to build Nothing into the go-to tech brand for Gen Z creatives.
Instagram content
“In a world where AI can generate infinite digital content, physical shared experiences become the scarcest, most valuable thing a brand can offer,” says Wallace-Williams, who believes that for Gen Z, the category boundary between “tech company” and “lifestyle brand” doesn’t exist like it does for older consumers. “So brands meeting them in culturally native spaces, whether that’s DJ sets, fashion collaborations, or curated IRL moments, aren’t code-switching. They’re speaking the language.”
Zero-slop zones
It’s not just tech hardware companies that are cultivating IRL experiences in a bid to emulate fashion’s playbook. OpenAI rival Anthropic recently collaborated with media brand Air Mail to host two temporary pop-ups at their newsstands across New York and London. The pop-ups were branded as “Claude’s Residency”, denoting the name of their AI chatbot, Claude.
Framed as a “zero-slop zone” and screen-free “thinking spaces”, the areas were previewed by creators before opening to the public. “Thinking cap” merchandise was also on offer. The caps were intended to “playfully emphasize the importance of human agency — the ethos at the heart of both Claude and this campaign”, Anthropic said in a statement, emphasizing how “by taking residency, Claude joins luxury brands like Bottega Veneta, Loewe, and Ralph Lauren.”
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The New York pop-up attracted more than 5,000 people and generated more than 10 million social media impressions, in a branding moment that felt closer to a streetwear drop than a tech event. As the businesses behind the biggest AI chatbots vie for consumer trust above all else, Anthropic centered this physical brand touchpoint around human agency, positioning itself as a “thinking partner” for cultured humans, rather than a human replacement to be feared.
“What Anthropic is doing is interesting because it’s trying to give something intangible a physical culture,” says Tom Garland, founder of brand consultancy Edition + Partners. “You can’t ‘photograph’ AI, and it’s difficult to dramatize. So pop-ups, objects, merch, printed matter — those things give it texture. They make it feel more legible in the real world.”
Tech as a cultural statement
Where Anthropic leaned on fashion’s pop-up model to build cultural cachet and trust, rival chatbot maker OpenAI has been commissioning creatives directly from fashion to help craft its first brand storytelling campaign for ChatGPT. Its first three-part film series Everyday Moments, released last September, was directed by Miles Jay (known for fashion and music work including Adidas and Nike campaigns), with stills by fashion photographer Samuel Bradley (who’s shot for Vogue and worked with the likes of Burberry and Lacoste) and styling by Carlos Nazario, whose portfolio spans Gucci, Prada, Marni, and more.
It’s part of a broader trend of tech poaching fashion talent, which several sources in the creative industries believe has been ramping up in recent months. Garland says his agency has experienced rising demand from tech brands coming to him with the same brief: we know what the product does, but how do we make people care? Or, how do we stop looking like a company and start looking like a brand?
“A lot of these businesses have spent years overindexing on functionality, claritys, and performance language. Now, they are realizing that distinctiveness lives somewhere else, too. It lives in codes, taste, tone, casting, image systems, language, physical experience, and community,” Garland continues. “They are looking to fashion and lifestyle, because those worlds are much better at turning products into symbols and are used to doing it at speed. Every time a new collectsion comes out, we are expected to understand what the consumer wants in that moment and produce something relevant, over and over again.”
OpenAI’s films position the chatbot as a supportive, everyday presence that aids users’ real-life interactions, at the same time eschewing highly polished futuristic AI visuals for a lo-fi human feel.
The hero film from OpenAI’s “Everyday Moments” Ad Campaign.
“Performance marketing traditionally hasn’t been the most compelling way to tell a story, and with its increased cost too, I do believe the pendulum is swinging back to brand storytelling,” says Musa Tariq, an advisor to the British Fashion Council, who’s spent the last 20 years leading branding teams at Burberry, Nike, Apple, and Airbnb. “So tech companies need to differentiate themselves, move away from performance and feature-driven marketing, and put more meaning into their brand to drive growth.”
Just as Anthropic aligned itself with a media brand written by cultural insiders to signal taste and status in the real world, OpenAI has commissioned respected fashion creatives to build a tech campaign that signals both taste and a fashion-adjacent visual language. “Most people cannot meaningfully assess the underlying AI model quality in the way industry insiders can, so they read the brand instead,” Garland says. “It means the brand becomes the thing that helps people interpret the product.”
For health-trackings wearables brand Whoop, this has meant making the tech product itself invisible. As it makes its first foray into fashion, Whoop’s new limited-edition performancewear drop, in collaboration with Samuel Ross’s SR_A, incorporates sensors into the clothes. “Whoop as a product needs to be worn continuously, and if you’re wearing something on your body continuously, it starts to blend into your fashion, identity, and status,” Whoop CEO Will Ahmed recently told Vogue. “So we wanted to push the boundaries of what that could feel like.”
As our broader wellness obsession increasingly blurs the lines between science, tech and fashion, Ross is convinced there’s a cohort of fashion-conscious consumers who are as equally drawn to Whoop’s band as they are to his streetwear designs as status symbols. “It’s almost become this parallel to a sense of soft power and being in the know,” he said. Whoop and SR_A tapped fashion photographer Gabriel Moses to shoot the campaign imagery for the collectsion launch.
“As technology becomes more visible in daily life — on your face, on your body, in your home, on Fifth Avenue — it starts operating more like fashion,” Garland says. “It becomes something people wear, signal, and build identity around. Even which AI you use says something about you: Copilot, you’re probably a finance bro; Claude, you’re more likely to be a creative and care about the ethics of this new world.”
Jacobson no longer defines Meta as a tech brand. “How about a lifestyle brand?” he says. “That gives us a lot of the benefits of being a fashion brand without feeling like we need to keep reinventing ourselves season after season. I’ve really been building our products and Meta Labs as lifestyle products and places, which is why we picked a theme.”
It’s a trend that has analysts likening tech to the role sneakers played in the 2000s, where they evolved from purely functional athletic gear into an expression of personal identity, functioning as a symbol of social status, cultural affiliation, and individuality. Cute tech-style collaborations between fashion brands and tech brands have proliferated in recent months, like Chopova Lowena’s partnership with Sony on a handbag to carry its WH-1000XM6 headphones, as Gen Z in particular lean into the kawaii trend of accessorizing with tech as a counter-trend to fears around the evolution of invisible AI. Nothing’s latest Headphone (a) drop was released this month in pink, yellow, black, and white colorways in a bold design and at a lower price evidently geared toward becoming a Gen Z statement accessory.
“The real story isn’t that tech brands are acting like fashion brands, it’s that technology itself has become a cultural object,” Garland says, underlining how consumers no longer judge tech on utility alone, but “through taste, identity, trust, and status”.
“Fashion has always been brilliant at turning products into symbols and selling emotion, meaning and recognition around them. And that is what tech wants now, especially in categories where the product is harder to distinguish,” he adds. “Personally, I think that’s a lot more interesting than another round of feature-led marketing.”
