Here’s part two (of three) from the Badgley Mischka Spring/Summer 2010 Preview at the 11th Amsterdam International Fashion Week.

The final segment of the show will be posted tomorrow.

We love it when designers prominently feature their eyewear lines in their seasonal fashion collections.

It’s even better when they put their eyewear on the runways.

Which is exactly what Mark Badgley and James Mischka did during their Spring/Summer 2010 preview at the 11th Amsterdam International Fashion Week.

The spring/summer ready-to-wear collection from Badgley Mischka was stunning enough on its own.

But what really made it sizzle was Badgley Mischka’s decision to place its couture sunwear on every single model on the catwalk:

This made for one of the most conspicuous displays of sunglasses in any major collection this year (and possibly in history), which of course makes us overjoyed, since we carry both the Badgley Mischka Couture Eyewear Collection and the very sunglass models featured in Amsterdam.

After more than a decade of silver dominating eyewear, it was also refreshing to Badgley Mischka pair gold sunwear with their spring/summer fashions.

White gold made a showing as well, but the emphasis was definitely on yellow, which perfectly complimented the warm browns, bronzes and golds in the Amsterdam collection.

Badgley Mischka and Sama deserve much of the credit for reviving the aviator style sunglass and making it chic and fashionable again.

The Perry with 22k gold lenses (which is repeatedly featured in the Amsterdam show) is a favorite of Angelina Jolie and other celebs and recently made an appearance in Rhianna’s So Hard video.

According to Brian Glascow of Sama Eyewear, the sunglass designs featured in the Badgley Mischka Amsterdam collection were custom made by Sama with special couture lenses especially for the show.

Out of this concept was the birth of the 22k and 18k gold lenses that are available as a premium couture option on select Badgley Mischka frames like the Boyd and Perry.

While aviators have been slowly making a comeback for the better part of two years, there really hasn’t been an ultra-premium, couture alternative to the classic Ray-Ban until Badgley Mischka and Sheila Vance of Sama introduced the 22k gold version of the Perry and Boyd sunglasses.

The Amsterdam show from Badgley Mischka also shows how versatile the aviator truly is (once you lux it up a bit.)

Notice how effortlessly the gold Badgley Mischka sunglasses move from formal wear, to flirty summer dresses, to swimwear.

There’s a reason that certain designs in eyewear become “classics” and the Badgley Mischka Spring/Summer collection clearly demonstrates the enduring appeal of the metal aviator.

The Badgley Mischka Eyewear models featured in the Amsterdam collection include: Perry, Boyd, Alfie, Corset, Bradley, Grant (Optical Frame) and the Marilyn.

Tomorrow we’ll post the second half of the Amsterdam show, which pairs these fantastic sunglasses up with beach and swimwear designs from the Badgley Mischka summer 2010 collection.

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We decided to celebrate the arrival of Spring by throwing a cocktail party at Urban Optiques.

But this isn’t just any cocktail party. While the  martinis, champagne and hors d’œuvres might be tempting enough on their own, the real centerpiece of the event will be the fabulous FRED-Paris Eyewear we’ll be featuring.

One of the world’s most coveted luxury eyewear brands, the FRED eyewear line features finishes in five microns of 22K  gold, platinum and palladium combined with diamonds, rubies, gems and temples inlaid with precious materials like iguana, exotic woods and buffalo horn.

FRED is rivaled only by Cartier for it’s jewelry-grade craftsmanship and quality.

Designed and produced by the legendary Paris jeweler FRED, each piece of  optical jewelry is meticulously-crafted by hand and takes seven days to create.

Many of the designs are inspired by pieces in the FRED jewelry collection, and styles range from sophisticated and elegant to chic and trendy.  Many of our clients will give the gift of FRED eyewear to others (and often themselves) for  special occasions or events where they might normally choose jewelry: anniversaries, birthdays, a promotion, or a daughter’s graduation from college.

Urban Optiques has partnered up with Deborah Signorello of Premiere Vision, the U.S. distributor of the FRED-Paris Luxury Eyewear Collection, to host an exclusive event showcasing the entire FRED collection.

This includes all of the FRED sunglass and eyeglass models (including different finish and material variations) as well as frames from the FRED Prestige Line, which combines diamonds, pearls and gemstones with precious metals and exotic woods.  Eyewear from the Prestige line can even be custom-designed to create a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry.

The Prestige line is truly optical jewelry at its finest and many of the pieces that Deborah will be presenting during the cocktail party are not normally part of our standard FRED collection at Urban Optiques.

This is a rare chance to view and try on some of the finest luxury eyewear produced on the planet.

The “Springtime in Paris” FRED Cocktail Party will be held Saturday, March 27th from 4 pm to 7 pm at Urban Optiques at 105 MainCentre in downtown Northville.

All guests who attend will be registered for a chance to win a pair of FRED PEARLS sunglasses and the first 20 people who RSVP and then attend the party will receive exclusive, complimentary Goodie Bags.

All guests will also receive a one-night-only discount on any purchase of FRED eyeglass frames or sunglasses.

Complimentary cocktails and hors d’œuvreswill also be provided.

The guest list will be limited, so RSVP online early to ensure your reservation.

For more information, please contact us at 248-347-9090 or RSVP online here.

This afternoon the buzz around Urban Optiques was all about the video:  Specifically the launch of Optiques TV, our new YouTube Channel dedicated to keeping our clients and patients (and the world, really) in the know around eyewear trends and vision care health.

For the launch of Urban Optiques TV,  we decided to put together a fast-paced, stylized video featuring one of our favorite (and most popular) eyewear designers and manufacturers: Lafont.

The whole idea was to produce a music-video inspired short film that brought Lafont’s nearly 100 year tradition of crafting chic, dazzling French eyewear together with images of the world’s most fashionable and romantic city.

We set it to a ‘60 French pop soundtrack to give it a little bit of that retro/vintage vibe that we all love so much around Urban Optiques.

We’re pretty happy with how it came out.

We’ve been featuring third-party video content on the Urban Optiques website as well as on our Fan page on Facebook for a while now, but we really wanted to start producing our own video content.

If a picture can tell a thousand words, then we figured a video can tell 10,000.

Because our product is very visual, anything we can do to make it more real and accessible to our clients and patients is a good thing. We’re really excited about how video can bring our unique eyewear and client experience to life, as well as educate patients on vision care and ocular health.

Tomorrow, we’ll debut Urban Optiques new commercial on Optiques TV, so be sure to check back.  It’s very cool.

Ideas for future videos are always welcome.

Look for upcoming pieces on Optiques TV featuring celebrity eyewear, sunglasses in movies,  and an educational piece of why you should never buy glasses without anti-reflective coating.

We’re also hoping to feature some of our patients and clients in their new eyewear, so if you are naturally drawn to the camera, let us know. We’d love to make you the star of our next feature!

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In the fashion industry, Tom Ford has built a name for himself as a designer who pushes boundaries, whether in his runway fashions at Gucci or in the racy promotional campaigns for Tom Ford Eyewear that got his advertising banned in Italy.

So it’s a bit surprising to see the former lead-designer at Gucci and now award-winning director of the critically-acclaimed movie “A Single Man” introduce so many retro-inspired eyeglasses into the current Tom Ford Eyewear collection.

Or maybe not.

Vintage-inspired fashion continues to be a major theme in spring and fall collections from Chanel, Lanvin, YSL and Dior, and Ford himself just finished directing a period-piece, so retro and vintage style eyewear is probably top of mind for Tom Ford.

Which brings us to our designer eyeglass of the week: The Tom Ford TF 5116.

This is another one of those Tom Ford eyeglasses that is screaming for the right face shape and attitude.

The TF 5116 is a round acetate frame with a thick temple that honestly won’t work on everyone. But if you do have a face that it meshes with, it’s an awesome eyeglass — especially for someone who wants to make a bold statement with their eyewear.

It’s less trendy than it is unique, in the same way that genuine vintage eyewear can express individuality and still not look so edgy that it hurts.

While this is officially a men’s eyeglass frame,  it can work on women as well.

If you have the right facial structure, this frame can be amazing. It’s actually a very classic design, and depending on what you wear with it, it will either look down-to-business (with a suit) or funky (with jeans and a leather coat.)

It is available in four different colors, including brown, slate, black and tortoise.

With the right face and personal style, the TF 5116 will bring you compliments, wealth and confidence.

Yes, this frame could change your life.

Well, maybe not your life (although there is always that chance), but definitely your look.

The Badgley Mischka Perry Sunglasses with 24K gold lenses just seem to get hotter every day. First spotted on Angelina Jolie over a year ago, the suns got a huge boost when they appeared in Rihanna’s “So Hard” video in November of last year.

And then we see this super lux aviator frame pop up yet again on Angelina in this clip of Jolie, Brad Pitt and the kids taken in Venice over the holidays (courtesy of Access Hollywood):

Love the voice-over from Access Hollywood:  “Put the rumors to rest:  Brad, Angie and the kids cruising the canals of Italy all bundled up and wearing sunglasses.”

While we love the shades, we do find it funny that Angelina and Brad Pitt seem to be the only ones on the streets of Venice wearing sunglasses …

One of the trends over the past year that we can’t get enough of is retro-inspired fashion and eyewear.

From cats-eye glasses, to heavier men’s frames with horned-rims, to the return of ’40s, ’50s and early-’60s-inspired oval shapes in women’s eyewear, retro continues to be extremely hot.

The great thing about retro-inspired eyewear and fashion is that their shapes, cuts and colors tend to be classical and enduring.

There’s a reason why vintage or vintage-inspired eyewear never really completely goes out of style: It works on a lot of different faces and can easily be matched to complement or contrast against a person’s own personal style.

One of our favorite retro-inspired women’s eyeglass frames is the FT-5117 from Tom Ford Eyewear.

Tom Ford doesn’t name his eyeglass models, choosing instead to use numbers versus words, so we usually end up developing nicknames around the shop to refer to different numbered models.  So the the Tom Ford FT 5117 is affectionately known around Urban Optiques as “that sexy librarian frame.”

Which pretty much describes this unique, half-moon acetate frame that’s meant to sit down just a tad on the bridge of your nose (or all the way down for that really smart, flirtatious-I’m-looking-over-my-reading-glasses-at-you-vibe.)

This frame feels like it’s straight out of a Mad Men episode:  Fuzzy sweaters, pencil skirts and all.

While this Tom Ford frame would be perfect on countless women in the secretary pool (if there still were secretary pools), it’s actually a very versatile, sophisticated style that would work great on a lawyer, doctor, teacher, young aspiring New York (or Detroit) fashion designer and yes …. even a librarian.

From a style perspective, the frame can match up with a lot of different looks and goes from office to martini bar effortlessly.  It has an extremely unique shape unlike any other woman’s frame we stock or have seen, so it’s almost guaranteed to to get you noticed (in a good way.)

It’s actually a fairly dainty frame — lightweight and not at all heavy on the face. The shape makes it ideal for a designer reading glass, but the lens height doesn’t lend itself to a progressive lens, so it’s really best for a woman with a single vision prescription.

But be forewarned: No matter how much you love the frame in photos, it may or may not actually work on your face.

It definitely looks stunning on Karen Elson (the British supermodel featured in Tom Ford Eyewear’s promotional materials and wife of Detroit’ s Jack White of the White Stripes), but she’s a supermodel and you could put a pair of $10 black plastic Limited Edition eyeglasses from China on her face and people would rant and rave.

So it does take a certain face to wear the Tom Ford FT 5117 eyeglasses.  Oval-shaped faces look great in this frame (but then again, they look great in most frame shapes), and women with high eyebrows and cheekbones seem to really shine in it.

But you should never let this discourage you from at least trying it on, since there is really no way to know whether any piece of eyewear will work until you put in on your face.

We currently stock the Tom Ford FT 5117 in two colors: The brown tortoise featured on Karen Elson and a similar color and pattern with a bit of a blue tint on the bottom half of the frame (which looks fantastic on women with blue eyes.)

If you haven’t noticed yet, we adore everything about Lafont.

From their inspired optical eyeglass collection that offers a color, pattern and frame shape for seemingly everyone (it’s just a matter of trying them on, trust us) to Lafont’s imaginative sunglass line that breaks every convention — yet seem to always look so sophisticated, classy … and well … so French –  Lafont continues to be one of our most popular eyewear lines among both our clients and the Urban Optiques team.

Last month, we refreshed our Lafont eyewear collection and brought in over sixty new Lafont frames from their 2010 Spring eyewear collection. Being the sun lovers that we are, we also picked a half-dozen new Lafont sunglass models as well for the store.

It’s how we people in the eyewear business remind themselves that Spring will eventually come: We buy new sunglass stock.

One of the Lafont sunglasses that really made our heart pound was the Lafont Brazil.

The Lafont Brazil is one of those sunglasses that just immediately jumps out at you when you see it.

It’s features a semi-round  frame (almost perfectly round, but not quite.)  It was big, but not huge … and it wasn’t plastic.  So it was immediately different from anything else you’ll typically see out there.

When I first saw it, the Lafont Brazil’s metal frame with the dainty crystal “rivets” running around the frame reminded me of the Eiffel Tower … if the Eiffel Tower’s was studded with diamonds.

The Lafont Brazil is also reminiscent of some of the slightly smaller, metal round sunglasses we started to see emerge on Paris runways over the past year, specifically this sunglass from Proenza Schouler (a line that we are contemplating adding):

This shape and material in sunglasses hasn’t taken widespread hold yet in the States, but we think Summer 2010 will be the year that you see more sunglasses following the lead of some of the European styles that have emerged over the past 12 months. And this frame-style is going to become really hot, in our opinion.

We’ve put this sunglass on about a dozen faces since receiving it from Lafont, and the reaction from clients  is always “Wow!”

The Lafont Brazil works surprisingly well on a wide-variety of face shapes, and it’s truly a unique, stand-out sunglass that will draw compliments whenever you wear it.

Even better, the Lafont Brazil comes in three frame colors with matching lens tints: A brown metal frame with brown gradient lenses, a gray/crystal frame with silver lenses or a purple frame with violet gradient lenses.

And all three of the models have the tiny, subtle crystal “studs” running around the metal frame.

The Lafont Brazil is a truly versatile sunglass — it works equally well with a suit or jeans.

And because you can’t just drive over to the local Sunglass Hut (we actually ask you to visit them and learn that they have nothing but the same old usual sunglasses you see on everyone)  and  get the Lafont Brazil (or any Lafont sunglass, for that matter), the chances of you getting caught dead in the same sunnies as your girlfriend (or nemesis) are pretty rare.

So tell us … are we crazy or is this just one cool French sunglass?