Thanks to the creativity of the designers and the savoir faire of the artisan spectacle frame makers I’m often seeing gaps in my wardrobe of spectacles.
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Recently, noticing a lack of a bold and colourful frame, I set my heart on getting a model called Sidney from Kirk&Kirk. The company’s latest range Centena, launched to celebrate 100 years of the Kirk family in optics, consists of 10mm thick, beautifully transparent and vibrantly coloured acrylic which is very comfortable to wear. What I like about transparent colours is how varied it can appear depending on how much light comes through the material, it also looks different on every wearer according to one’s skin tone.
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I’ve been ‘playing’ with spectacle frames for more than forty years, glazing, repairing, adjusting, manipulating and adapting them. Putting frames on people, offering opinions and making suggestions has taught me a great deal about the value of well designed and well made spectacles. The impact that a great design and a good fitting spectacle has on revealing someone’s personality, on their style, on their image, or the image they wish to project, is priceless. It gives each person the opportunity to express themselves in what I think is an undervalued endeavour, the artistic expression of presentation, to be well dressed and groomed. It feels good to wear great eyewear like it feels good to wear great clothes.
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If anyone were to agree with these sentiments and maybe even act on them, I hope that they would experience the same joy and satisfaction that I get each time that I wear this Kirk&Kirk Sidney in colour Corn, a striking yellow. I put a grey photochromic lens in this frame so that I might be able to wear it as frequently as possible, in line with other wardrobe choices. Being blessed with colour vision it would be neglectful not to play with it.