Thinking of starting a vintage eyewear page on Instagram. I could do this all on my own Instagram page, which I recently started (add it if you do Instagram, and like eyewear content https://www.instagram.com/mosslipow/), but pondering starting another. These Futura sunglasses are just a taste of some of the even more interesting, exotic and rare pieces I’d be sharing. What say you? Watch this space, hit the subscribe button on the top left of this page to facilitate that… And follow the Instagram page I already have up! Again: https://www.instagram.com/mosslipow/ Thanks. The post Vintage Sun ..read more

I was talking to a couple friends who own or have owned high end, boutique optical stores. The subject was selling very high end eyewear. They described customers who spent enormous amounts of money on watches, handbags, cars, practically everything, but balk at the idea of spending anything remotely comparable on eyewear. This doesn’t describe everyone, but it’s not untypical. In general, price ceiling at the highest end in eyewear is lower than most any other worn or carried object. Why is that? Eyewear’s the most important accessory. You wear it on your face, not your wrist, or slung over ..read more

The following conversation has repeated itself often in the past few years: Somebody: “So what do you do? Me: “I make eyeglasses and sunglasses.” Somebody: “Isn’t there this this one company that owns all the brands and controls everything?” For many years, Luxottica flew below the general public’s radar. But not anymore. Let me first say, I think Luxottica is a great company, and Leonardo Del Vecchio is a personal hero of mine. His life story is one of overcoming enormous odds to achieve enormous success. The focus here is to try to understand the recent blizzard of negative press and why th ..read more

One of the many retail doors Warby Parker has opened since 2013 I first heard about Warby Parker before most people, I think. I was friendly with Kate Spade (God rest her soul), who had just opened a store with her husband Andy. They were doing an event for Warby Parker. I attended. It was nice enough. I really didn’t think much about it until a few months later, when suddenly the company was everywhere. At that point, almost everyone I met asked me what I thought of them. Many must have assumed nobody ever thought of selling prescription eyewear online before. I noted it was already a difficu ..read more

Hello friends. I will be at booth 5C146 at SILMO in Paris this weekend. I’m doing my first new line in over 5 years. It will be very limited production and available for pre-order. I think it’s some of my best work yet. If you’re there, drop by and say hi. It’d be nice to see you ..read more

Chinese spectacles, probably 18th or 19th Century, on an invitation to a fine museum retrospective of eyewear in Treviso this past summer. I spent some time in Italy this summer: the region between Venice and the Dolomites. I was there to tour factories and have meetings, but you can’t get away from the 2500 or so years of history that surround you. You drive along mountain passes that Hannibal might have crossed; you stroll through towns with no tourist guide and accidentally happen upon Roman mosaics and Romanesque cathedrals, almost casually strewn, here and there. Venice is probably the ..read more

In the late 1970s, through the 1980s, there was a group of young men in Japan who loved American denim. They were aficionados and collectors. As more efficient, and cheaper production methods proliferated worldwide, they felt traditional brands were no longer up to snuff, so they began forming companies to produce their own. A group of some of the earliest such brands would become known as The Osaka Five: Studio D’Artisan, Warehouse, Evisu, Denime and Full Count. Although their denim and hardware was authentically vintage in quality and appearance, they still released original, though classic ..read more

Whenever I tell anyone what I do, they usually ask: How did you get into eyewear? Well… One seemingly ordinary day, toward the end of my teens, I went to my optometrist. It was time for a routine examination. Only this examination turned out not to be very routine at all. Upon completing all my tests, the optometrist said wanted to speak to me about something. I stared blankly at the doctor as he explained to me that as I’d grown taller and taller—I was a so-called “late bloomer,” and continued to grow until I was almost twenty—my eyeballs had gotten longer and longer, causing the focus of ima ..read more

In a previous post, I looked back at Prada’s abortive attempt to control their own eyewear licensing in collaboration with De Rigo. When Luxottica subsequently took over the license in 2002, they promised to nearly quadruple Prada Eyewear’s lagging sales in one year. This raises an interesting question. Had Prada’s stature with consumers, as a brand, plummeted during their own venture into eyewear? Had signing a contract with Luxottica immediately raised it four fold, so they could sell four times as much eyewear? I’ve read some recent articles and opinion pieces talking up the importance of ..read more

When you collect anything seriously, you develop sources. Eyewear is no different. One of my best was a very old man, with a long scar on his face and an archaic Brooklyn accent, right out of a 1930s gangster movie. His name was Jimmy. Anytime I was looking for something unusual, he seemed able to get it. I bought a lot from him over the years, but the most intriguing piece he ever sold me was a pair of granny glasses made of baleen. This was no ordinary piece. Baleen frames are very unusual in and of themselves, I’ve only run across a few, but it was the lenses that fascinated me. They measu ..read more