Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
During the 50s which was known as the austere years after the war…
it was very hard to get people to spend a lot of money on glasses so my father realised that he had to something unusual
to get them to go and buy something and he created this particular design,
which as you can see is fitted with bamboo or malacca cane as its real name is
and this was featured in Vogue magazine and was very, very successful
and the only thing you had to be careful of was not to get the bamboo wet because it might sprout.
I started designing in 1964-65 and… my very first design that was aloud to be put into production
was this design which I called ‘Rip’, R,I,P. The unusual feature about the design is that in the nose piece here is flat
where as normal frames would have an outward bump here… so this was on display and we had...
...the bell rang at the showroom and my Father went to answer the door
and standing there was Arthur Askey who was a comedian and Lord Snowdon who had recently married Princess Margret
and my father asked… ‘who’s first’… and Arther Askey said ‘his lordship’s first stupid, who’d you think’
and so my father obviously saw to Lord Snowdon first and he was looking for new spectacles
and he came across this pair which was on display, tried it on, loved it
and he had this made up for his prescription. He was subsequently photographed at a…
...judging entries for a glass-wear show, not an optical show, but a glass wear for vases etc
and… this was a great feeling for me to see my first, my very first production design
being worn by a celebrity such as Lord Snowdon.
1974… was the year of the ‘punk’ and we… wanted to get in on the act,
so my father and I started rummaging around in the drawers to see what we could actually adorn the frames
with to make them look like punk glasses.
So we found various items like paper clip’s, bits of chains, studs and various things
and we put these onto the sunglasses, showed it to Vogue, and Vogue said ‘wow, we have got to use this’
and they did. Then it snowballed on because we found that our customers such as Harrods, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols
were asking us ‘can we have them’ because we have got customers coming in asking for them,
especially the ‘Sloaney’ set who want to imitate anything which is fashionable at the time.
So we had to really dig deep into every draw we could find and get all our staff to look in their drawers to find
what they see we could use to adorn these glasses and they proved to be very popular as a sunglass.