BY DESIGN : Out of Sight
The clutter on Dr. Blake Kuwahara’s birch desk suggests that he’s something of a nature lover.
Delicate eye wear inspired by twigs, pebbles, seashells and leaves litters his work space and the surrounding shelves. One pair of frames, its sidepieces sculpted out of metal in the form of uneven bamboo, rests on the bridge of the creator’s nose.
The glasses make up an eco-driven unisex collection called Gaia, named for the Greek goddess of nature and sold under the Kata label. Kuwahara, a doctor of optometry-turned-designer, developed the artful line in 1992 while working for Culver City-based Wilshire Designs, one of the nation’s top eye-wear makers.
This spring, he launched a second Kata collection called Evos (evocative and evolutionary) that combines precious metals and colored plastics in sensuous variations on the oval. While Gaia seeks to call attention to the simplest--and often neglected--forms of nature, Evos aims to capture the human spirit as expressed through movement, the designer says.
“The word kata has to do with the old Japanese sense of aesthetics and appreciation for real simple lines and forms, and also the greater respect for nature,” says Kuwahara, 33, who grew up in Monterey Park.
Chilton Gaines, manager of the Optical Shop of Aspen on Melrose Avenue and an early Kata supporter and vendor, says the label succeeds because the frames are unusual yet wearable. “Customers think it’s different in the sense that it has a nature theme. . . . But it’s subtle, not overbearing and flamboyant.”
The Gaia and Evos lines are pricey, from $250 to $400, and are sold only through such specialty retailers as the Optical Shop of Aspen, Senses in Santa Monica, the Eyes Have It in Sherman Oaks and Barneys New York in Beverly Hills.
Kuwahara says he hopes to keep Kata, a growing $3-million business, small. And although he is a nature lover, he’s not out to capitalize on concern for the environment. More philosopher than philanthropist, Kuwahara says he simply wants to illustrate through an inanimate object the relationship between man and Earth.
Many Kata designs incorporate a raw edge or a deliberate and distinguishable flaw to illustrate this delicate balance. “Like the human face itself. For example, the right temple is not necessarily a mirror image of the left,” the designer says. And some of his frames change from side to side; on the right may be a temple tip, on the left, nothing.
There is meaning in what some might consider Kuwahara’s madness. “I’m trying to show the irregularity in nature--there are no straight lines. The collection attempts to show a little bit of that asymmetry by combining elements that are very textural, very dimensional but not necessarily balanced.”
The notion of making eye wear more than a device to improve vision is relatively new. In the mid-’70s, Gloria Vanderbilt, Gucci and Christian Dior began putting their signatures on thick plastic frames and calling them fashion. The $13-billion eye-wear business continued to expand throughout the ‘80s, when such entertainers as Elton John turned frames into a two-ring circus. Kuwahara says the current design trend is toward conservative yet elegant frames featuring smaller oval and geometric lenses. In the austere ‘90s, quality and value have replaced designer cachet.
Now head designer for Wilshire Designs, Kuwahara also creates eye wear under such moderately priced labels as Liz Claiborne, Camp Beverly Hills and Jordache. He says he never set out to be an eye-wear designer, let alone an emerging force in the field.
“My first year at UCLA was really tracked to be a dentist,” he says, adding that he enjoyed the research requirements but ultimately winced at the idea of “looking down patients’ mouths.” He toyed with the thought of becoming an interior designer--but worried about the financial rewards. He finally settled on optometry because it offered a creative outlet.
“There really isn’t another medical field that has the retail aspects to it, like optometry has with selling eye wear. And I really enjoy the fashion (part),” he says.
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, school of optometry in 1986, Kuwahara went to work as a junior partner for the Manhattan Beach Vision Group, with optometry offices in the South Bay. He quickly discovered that he didn’t enjoy seeing patients as much as he did working in the company’s dispensary and overseeing the eye-wear buyers. So when Wilshire Designs advertised in the newspaper for an in-house designer and fashion forecaster, he mailed off his resume.
“They weren’t interested at all,” he recalls. “They thought, ‘What would an optometrist want with a position like this?’ ”
Yet he persuaded company owner Dick Haft to take a chance on him. “I saw a certain style in Blake,” Haft says. “And his thoughts about what he’d like to accomplish really reached me. I know (for him) the job as an optometrist was like working in a black hole, and I could see he wanted to emerge.”
On-the-job training started immediately.
“At first, I was like a fish out of water,” Kuwahara says. “I didn’t really have the tools to do anything.” He attended the huge trade show Vision Expo to meet vendors and get a feel for the market, manufacturing and importing. Soon afterward, he started designing the Liz Claiborne line, then other labels. At the end of his second year, he joined other in-house designers and marketers in conceiving Kata.
“Initially, it was a group effort between my father, my wife and Blake,” says Russ Haft, Dick Haft’s son and president of Eyota, the distribution arm for Kata. “But clearly Blake has emerged as the creative force of the product.”
