The World in Seven Objects
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Vintage sunglasses Jacqueline Onassis was renowned for leading many fashion trends: the pink Chanel suit, the Lilly Pulitzer dress, the Hermès scarf. But there’s one item that truly became her signature – those paparazzi-confounding, jet-setting sunglasses. Half a century after she popularized them, Jackie O’s favourite “bug-eye” Nina Ricci 3203 shades are not only coveted by fashionistas from Lady Gaga to model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, but are being reissued by the French fashion house and L’Amy America. Retro specs are flying off shelves from Hollywood to the Persian Gulf. As a result, a growing number of emporia have sprung up selling original retro frames. Los Angeles can claim to be the vintage shades capital of the world, with specialists such as Russ Campbell’s Old Focals dressing the film industry (it furnished Mad Men’s Don Draper with Olympians by Bausch + Lomb). Also scouring yard sales and buying up “dead stock” from old optometrists around the world are the Vintage Frames Company in Montreal, which has 100,000 frames; Klasik in London, which has sold vintage eyewear for 13 years; and Berlin’s Vintage Sunglasses: so enormous it’s become known as a sunglasses superstore. Contemporary sunglasses lost their allure in the mid-1990s, when mass production made them disposable. Vintage eyewear offers quality, durability and solid technology, which is why you’ll now hear the fashion crowd talking of the classic shapes worn by such icons as Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn and Steve McQueen in reverent terms: tear-drop “aviators”; top-heavy “browlines”; slinky “cat eyes” and round “tea shades”. Never before has it been so fashionable to look through old glass darkly. www.vintagesunglasseslondon.co.uk
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