Luxottica Group, the Italian eyewear fashion brand which owns Ray-Ban, has formed a strategic partnership with Google which will see it developing and selling its own version of Google Glass.

Luxottica says it will be working with Google across multiple efforts to create wearable devices that straddle the line between high-fashion, lifestyle and innovative technology, including its Ray-Ban and Oakley brands.

The partnership might give Glass some much-needed help with its image problem. The technology is interesting, but early adopters still largely fall into the geek market – or, as their more unkind critics put it, Glassholes. Its difficult to imagine a fashion-conscious consumer choosing to wear Glass in its current form – which Google has this week acknowledged “may look as funny to us [in the future] as that mobile phone from the mid 80s”.

“We live in a world where technological innovation has dramatically changed the way in which we communicate and interact in everything that we do,” said Luxottica CEO Andrea Guerra. “More importantly, we have come to a point where we now have both a technology push and a consumer pull for wearable technology products and applications.

“Seeing such a future, over the last years, Luxottica invested heavily in building out our technology platforms and digital solutions to combine with our products excellence. We believe that a strategic partnership with a leading player like Google is the ideal platform for developing a new way forward in our industry and answering the evolving needs of consumers on a global scale.”