One of the more pleasant surprises in my readings about eyewear was a little book called “More Than Meets The Eye”. It was a privately published history commemorating the 50th anniversary of Foster Grant in 1972. I’d guess it was meant for internal consumption within Foster Grant and limited use outside the company. Jessica WoodwardHalf […]
Vintage Red White and Blue Sunglasses by Eyewear’s Best Unknown Designer
I guess everybody in the U.S. begins their July 4th holiday tomorrow. Nowadays people in the United States eat barbecue, detonate small explosives and watch professionals detonate larger explosives by way of celebration. Things were more patriotic in 1976 when we had the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. You can tell by all the […]
Space age sunglasses… Not to be confused with Elvis Presley sunglasses.
I never looked into it but I think there must have been a technical advance in surfacing styrenes with metal finishes around 1968 or so. An avalanche of plastic sunglasses with metal plating came tumbling down on consumers over a five year period beginning around then. There were lots of variations on the theme of […]
Combat Used AN6531 WWII Aviator Sunglasses – But Who was Captain M.D. Butler?
Contractors made an enormous amount of materials for the U.S. Army and Navy during WWII. According to American Optical’s website: “Between 1943 and 1944, a total of 10 million goggles frames, 5 million pairs of sunglasses and over 6.5 million pairs of lenses were ground and polished including 1.4 million prescriptions delivered to the Armed […]
Frame of the Week: The first Christian Dior optyl sunglasses
As far as I know these were the first Christian Dior sunglasses made of optyl, the miracle resin that was supposed to supplant cellulose acetate. They date from about 1969. Wilhelm Anger, the inventor of optyl had taken over the Dior license from Tura in 1966. Optyl apparently wasn’t ready for commercial production yet, so […]