Gentle Monster Taps Joaquin Phoenix For Its Intelligent Eyewear Campaign
As a creative callback to the actor’s role in the 2013 film, ‘Her.’
Gentle Monster has revealed a look at its upcoming Intelligent Eyewear collection via a cinematic teaser starring Academy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, the project marks the Seoul-based eyewear label’s official foray into smart glasses, blending its signature visual world building with wearable innovation.
The Intelligent Eyewear collection, in partnership with Google and Samsung, has been surfacing across the year, first on stage at Google I/O in May, where Google showed an early Gentle Monster frame. In July at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked in London, a second, boxier black style appeared alongside the first proper hardware details for the audio-only models; a reveal that was complemented by a campaign starring Anok Yai and Alex Consani.
For this campaign, Glazer constructs an eerie narrative around Phoenix, who plays a traveling salesman stranded in an unfamiliar hotel where normal reality quickly deteriorates. The plot follows Phoenix down a red-lit hallway as he encounters unexplainable figures and learns to communicate through the tech-enabled frames.
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Casting Phoenix in a story about learning to speak to the unknown through a piece of technology carries a deliberate-feeling echo of Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 film in which he played a lonely writer who falls in love with an AI operating system. This creative choice speaks to a brand that knows exactly where it sits; deep in the creative communities and world building it has spent years cultivating. It also feels close enough to the current conversation around AI and our relationships with machines to make a smart glasses launch feel like part of that conversation rather than a product dropped into the middle of it.
As for the eyewear itself, wearers will be able to translate conversations as they happen, get directions, hear condensed versions of incoming messages, save notes and share footage from their own point of view. The frames work with iPhones as well as Android handsets, and Samsung has said the battery should stretch to around nine hours.
Gentle Monster arrives in the smart glasses market with the kind of credibility most tech companies spend years trying to buy, having long treated technology as both a creative tool and something worth making work about, with an in-house robotics lab and a team behind some of the most mesmerising kinetic installations in retail. Its futurism has always felt lived in, grounded in stories about where people and technology might be heading together, and that history gives the brand a genuine claim to the category that fashion audiences can not only recognize, but get behind.
Pre-orders for the Gentle Monster Intelligent Eyewear line open November 12 on the Gentle Monster webstite, followed by a public preview running November 13 through November 23 in New York.
For more from Gentle Monster, check out the brand’s fourth collaboration with Maison Margiela.
