There is no lack of creativity or of ingeniousness. On our desk (or rather, on our computer) each day arrives new of products, eyewear, new collections, finishes and materials which are more than noteworthy. What I often see, however, is a flattening in the field of communication and image. In advertising we are swamped by faces in close-up, looking at us, with a sometimes fixed gaze, through the lenses of the frames they are wearing. In press releases we either drown in a maelstrom of words, Anglicisms borrowed from the world of fashion, high-flown declarations of unproven uniqueness, or we have to attempt to describe a product on the basis of a sort of telegram telling us “collection name, model name, colors, eye sizes, period”.
And yet each eyewear model, collection and accessory springs from the story of the company
producing it, from an idea, from a need expressed by the market and by customers, from a sensation, a state of mind, a trend picked up by the special antenna of creators and designers.
Few know how to tell us the genesis and development of their products, giving us the right clues to best communicate them to our readers. Who are ultimately the ones who will be selling them to end users, who in their turn would perhaps be more involved in the product if they knew how and why it was created and would wear it with more pride. Don’t tell me that the material of the moment ,the latest fashion, is cellulose acetate. This is not news. New may instead be the return to attention to detail, the search for an almost artisan skill, to a discrete elegance, to the re-interpretation of values of the past, matching them to what we are today.
We speak to experts in the field who too often forget, or even do not know, what it means to work acetate or metal, about the workmanship, trials, prototypes, the hours spent in experimenting, which all this involves.
Let’s tell them about it.
Found in Vedere International, October 2008
