We Got A Glimpse of the New John Galliano and Tod’s Line of Sunglasses and You Are Going to LOVE Them!

This week  Marcolin, the U.S. distributor of Tom Ford, Tod’s and DSquared2, stopped in to show us the new sunglass lines from John Galliano and Tod’s.

At first we were a little skeptical.

We’ve been searching for some new eyewear lines to add at Urban Optiques for several months now, and what we’ve seen so far (outside of Francis Klein) hasn’t particularly impressed us.

We pretty much knew what we didn’t want:  Yet another line of sunglasses from some giant corporate design center with yet another fashion designer’s name stuck on the temple with something akin to Super Glue as an afterthought.

There are tons of those brands out there, and outside of the designer logo itself, there’s really not much in terms of unique design to differentiate these eyewear lines from each other.

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Tom Ford Goes Super-Retro with the TF 5116 Eyeglass Frame

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.

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The FT-5117 Women’s Eyeglass from Tom Ford Brings the Sexy Back in this Little, Sophisticated, Retro-Inspired Spectacle

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.

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