Creating a Spectacle
In 1965, when Barbara McReynolds was fresh out of high school and hunting around for a unique pair of glasses, she persuaded a veteran optician in Newport Beach to adapt some vintage frames. Her friends loved the look, and she was hooked on the concept--so much so that she went to work in the optician’s office to learn everything she could about eye wear. When he opened a branch in Irvine to cater to students at UCI, she brought in her high school friend, Gai Gherardi, to help run the store.
“People were wearing Mack trucks on their faces back then,” says Gherardi. “The choice was mostly between butterfly shapes in pink with rhinestones and basic models in black or tortoiseshell.”
Thus was sown the seed that later grew into L.A. Eyeworks, producers of artistic eyeglasses and pioneers of a niche that now seems inextricably linked with Los Angeles style. The duo opened its business in 1979, and in the years since not only helped pioneer the revival of Melrose Avenue, but also improved the four-eyed visages of the likes of Elton John, Jodie Foster, Robin Williams and Mick Jagger.
They have a loyal local following. “I love being framed--by this artful, inventive, exciting group who create spectacles for this spectacular L.A.,” says gallery owner Jan Baum.
For Tim Street-Porter, the dapper London-born photographer, “They’re still hipper and chic-er than anyone else, with a great sense of fashion.”
Next month, Gherardi and McReynolds will open a new store on Beverly Boulevard at Martel Avenue in Los Angeles as a showcase for their own eyeglass and sun-wear designs, complementing the Melrose emporium, which will continue to sell a mix of imported eye wear. The shop, which is still a construction site, will be the first major building by architect Neil Denari, the recently departed director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
To have a shop devoted to their own work is the culmination of a creative association that has occupied most of their lives. Both were born in 1946 in Huntington Beach, and they’ve become almost like twins, each anticipating the other’s thoughts and finishing the other’s sentences.
Friends describe Gherardi, whose partner of 26 years is Rhonda Saboss, director of the Dirt Gallery in West Hollywood, as a party on wheels, gregarious and jolly. McReynolds, who is single, is the more serious and quieter one, with a great entrepreneurial sense and an eye for color.
From the first, Gherardi and McReynolds were inspired by the era’s then-burgeoning pop-music scene--Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Lovin’ Spoonful all performed at Huntington Beach’s legendary Golden Bear Club. As they looked around for frames they could tweak, the sexiest option they could find was the Bausch & Lomb Wayfarers that lifeguards wore, an American classic that would later be appropriated on the silver screen by the Blues Brothers.
They bought a bunch of the thick, dark frames, sandblasted them to remove the shine, added vibrant colors, fitted them with prescription lenses and sold them to young women. They also transformed other ready-mades, discovering that a crystal frame can be dyed, plastic can be heated and stretched into interesting new shapes and that etching initials onto lenses can add to their appeal.
Over the course of the 1970s, the two learned their craft, earned licenses as opticians and began to chafe at the restrictions of working for people with less imagination than they had.
Chance guided them to Melrose Avenue. The street, they say, was full of mail-order electronics and furniture finishers when a friend told them of a vacant storefront. They knew they needed to be located on a major cross-town axis, and it seemed like a good fit.
“We wanted to be a diamond in the rough,” says McReynolds. “Melrose was cheap, and it wouldn’t define us as a smarter street like Rodeo or a mall would have.”
They took their first original design to France to be manufactured because at the time no one was making frames in the U.S., they say. Knowing nothing of the business, they placed an order for 50 frames. The factory manager explained that the usual minimum was 500, but, incredibly, accepted their assurance that they’d soon reorder.
The first line sold briskly, and the store was briefly so popular that the crowds forced them to lock the door and keep customers waiting on the sidewalk until others left. A call from Henri Bendel in New York for a contribution for the Christmas catalog put L.A. Eyeworks into the wholesale business.
Looking back on those early years, the two marvel at their luck--and their naivete. At one point, they designed a compound metal and plastic frame and accepted orders, but it took a year to get it produced. By the time it was in hand, a large firm had taken the idea and flooded the market.
On their first sales trip to the Paris trade show, they lined up customers from almost every European country and returned with sample frames by the hot French designer Alain Mikli.
“Elton John came in the store [in L.A.] and wanted to buy them, but they were the only ones we had and as precious as Picassos to us,” Gherardi recalls. “So we told him no, but finally relented and let him buy one pair.”
Melrose proved an ideal location. By the early 1980s, the sidewalks were jammed on the weekends with kids drawn in by the trendy boutiques, restaurants and clubs. More than just a shop, Gherardi and McReynolds used L.A. Eyeworks as a gallery for art and oddball items to set off the frames, and their windows became billboards for social and political causes. They opened City Cafe in a sliver of space next door, bringing in first Susan Feniger and then Mary-Sue Milliken--L.A.’s Too Hot Tamales--as chefs. Later, as partners, the quartet launched the ambitious City Restaurant and two Border Grills. In 1995, Gherardi and McReynolds sold their interest in the restaurants to concentrate on eye wear.
An advertising campaign that began 20 years ago and shows no sign of faltering has given L.A. Eyeworks visibility coast to coast and in Europe. The catchy slogan, “A face is like a work of art. It deserves a great frame,” was the work of Chiat/Day’s Jeff Gorman; his cousin, Greg Gorman, photographed the now-signature black-and-white portraits of celebrities and cult favorites wearing the pair’s designs. Levi Dexter, an English rockabilly musician, was the first to appear, followed by Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s, Pee-wee Herman and 200 more.
“Just when you think we’re all about underground performance artists, we’ll include a baseball player,” Gherardi says, “and we’ll follow that with a drag queen like RuPaul, a Shakespearean actor and then a glam rock star. We’ll run all those ads in a gay magazine like Out and in an electronic media bible like Wired.”
Even in their earliest days, there was a politically charged side to Gherardi’s and McReynolds’ work. In their own creative protest against the Vietnam War, they ground super-thick lenses for boys to wear to their physical exams, just the look of which could immediately disqualify the wearer from the draft. The two take part annually in the Divine Design benefit supporting Project Angel Food, which provides food to people living with AIDS, and they raised $80,000 for an AIDS hospice through sales of one of their popular frames.
They created disposable 3-D glasses for “Monsters of Grace,” an avant-garde multimedia piece by Robert Wilson staged in 1998, and also designed frames for a recent modern-dress production by the L.A. Opera of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
If their first inspiration came from the music scene and improvised street fashion, where a strategically placed safety pin could be a statement, their Melrose location meant they had only to look out the door to see what Gherardi calls “a tide of humanity in all its glory.”
Ideas often sprang from chance encounters. McReynolds returned from a recent trade show in New York reeling from the stimulus of a retrospective of paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter.
Rough sketches lead to drawings and prototypes, all done by hand. Their goal, they say, is to reduce size and weight while maximizing impact. They pioneered laser-cutting and employed it to match super-thin lenses and frames, and they use laser-engraving to create textures and patterns on the frames, including maps of L.A. Gherardi and McReynolds need as little as an ounce and a few square inches of material to allow the face to make a statement.
Hundreds of colors are used singly or laminated in contrasting tones. In the current collection, a continuous loop of metal provides a seamless frame, and titanium is dyed in lustrous colors and combined with plastic temples in contrasting shades. The house signature came in the rounded temple tips that Gherardi calls frog toes--for the tree frogs that she keeps in her office.
A second L.A. Eyeworks store opened in Costa Mesa in 1988 and is run by Heather Gherardi, Gai’s sister. The glasses sell from Japan to Saudi Arabia, and the company has opened a corporate office in France to coordinate European sales. Though the pair describe their operation as “a speck” in market share, they are unwilling to give figures on how much they have grown.
They freely admit, however, that over the past five years the field has become much more competitive as Gucci, Jil Sander and other leading companies began to exploit eyeglasses as high fashion, a part of their look, not merely something to license for profit. Specialty companies like Oliver Peoples have also entered the business and the shelf-life of frame styles has shortened from about four years to one. These days, new designs are presented, like clothes, every spring and fall.
None of this fazes McReynolds. “Even though I have drawers of glasses, I’ve dressed up for an event and not found the right pair to match my outfit,” she says. “People see your face before they look at your feet, so you should have more eyeglasses than shoes. It’s something I feel passionately about.”