Oakley is known for its innovation in the eyewear category and we expect nothing but the best every time they come up with something new. The futuristic Moonveil cape for tough sports in extreme conditions impressed us a lot. Now, the California-based eyewear pros have revealed the Flex Scape performance eyewear that comes with a hybrid frame to function both as alpine goggles and sunglasses.
This fashion-forward eyewear makes use of PhysioMorphic Geometry and is based on the acclaimed Kato model. The former ensures a natural fit around the face for a wide level of coverage. This new launch gives active individuals more reason than one to invest in the brand, both for their jogs in the city and explorations in the high mountains.
The USP of these ski goggles is their ability to adapt to the wearer’s face for unmatched comfort and performance. The purpose-built nature of the lens conforms to the facial structure just like a mask dies. This results in a wide field of vision which is important in fast action sports or highly active lifestyle activities. The switch from the goggles to the sunglasses is easy with the one-size-fits-all woven strap. Each of the single-layer lenses comes with the brand’s signature Prizm technology which is highly optimized for color, contrast and detail – wherein there is a significant reduction in distortion, reflection and refraction. No wonder top athletes swear by the performance of products equipped with this tech. The durability of these goggles is top notch like all times, and you don’t have to worry about high-impact collisions on the slope.
According to team Oakley athlete Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, the 100% UV-protected glasses are a game-changer having the flexibility to flex from the mountains to the streets. Not only does it look dope but also suits any lifestyle from air to apres. The Oakley Flex Scape goggles cum sunglasses priced at $373 are available in two colors – Matte Black with Prizm 24K and Matte Grey Snow with Prizm Snow Sapphire Iridium.
Oakley is no stranger to creating innovative lifestyle products that are of the highest quality. Their groundbreaking sunglasses are vouched by the best athletes out there for a good reason. Now, the American company has unveiled a limited-edition cape that fuses with their high-end glasses.
Fit for a futuristic world, the Oakley Moonveil design is limited to just 100 pieces and carries the original concept art from Dark Horse’s Genesis comics. The artwork is done by Oakley product designers and carries a Moonveil image on the backside. There’s no word on the pricing of this exclusive piece, however, the availability is promised in September 2024, directly from Oakley’s website.
Oakley has created a brand new headwear category in the industry with this product that foresees a better life outside the bunkers in the future after the Doomsday effect settles down. The unique headwear will be featured in the Future Genesis Chapter One, and according to Brian Takumi, Oakley’s Vice President of Brand Heritage and Creative, “We are connecting the worlds inside and outside of Future Genesis through a vision of empowerment and revolutionary innovation in design.”
In-house designers were able to blur the boundaries of innovation with this self-contained piece. Using State-of-the-art Physiomorphic Geometry, the design got the freedom in form, resulting in an enhanced wearing experience. Adaptability and flexibility are at the core of this jet-black cape with integrated sunglasses. The rotating system of the knitted cape allows the user to toggle between the dual Prizm lenses. One of them is the Prizm 24K lenses for maximum eye protection when the sun gets too harsh. The other is Prizm Low Light lenses which enhance vision with in-built light transmission for low-light conditions.
The front of the balaclava-style cape has a zipper placket for a tailormade fit that allows the wearer to quickly switch between styles. It can be adorned in an open style or zipped-up protection configuration for harsh weather or a sense of secrecy. The headwear cum eyewear will be perfect for athletes, photographers and mountaineers who venture out in extreme weather conditions. The level of flexibility and attractive styling of the cape makes it one of Oakley’s best-ever creations.
Introducing the HMD’s Phonecore range, which is a destined conversation starter no matter the gathering you are heading into. This range of smartphone-inspired accessories includes a pair of Pulse Pro-inspired sunglasses that look like an impressive pair of smart glasses, a smartphone backpack, and a belt that’s made to hold your phone like a policeman’s walkie-talkie in the belt.
The striking smart glasses and other accessories in glacier green color are made by HMD in partnership with fashion designer Sinead Gorey. Made during the London Fashion Week, the eyewear is a little like a functional pair of smart glasses we have seen over the years; it’s a statement-making device with elongated rectangular black lenses and an oversized frame that mimics the screen of the new phone.
Besides the glasses, the Phonecore range in itself is intended to accentuate the HMD Pulse Pro unlike anything gimmicky seen before. The range of accessories has the industry talking about its oversized design and bold outlook, which ‘won’t make you smart but would definitely make the HMD smartphone, smarter.’
Along with the oversized glasses, as mentioned above, the Phonecore range includes a mobile backpack. This is a 3D-printed backpack which is big enough to only carry a smartphone. It is complemented by a toolkit-style belt with a pouch, designed again to carry nothing but your phone. Interestingly, none of these accessories are usable in real-life scenarios, it’s only to satiate your style quotient.
HMD Pulse Pro is a discussion-worthy debut smartphone under their own brand. It comes with interesting new features, which are unique to the sub $200 range, like affordable spare parts for at-home reparability, over three years of updates, and fast storage. But the aspect that kills it really is its 50-megapixel front camera with gesture-activated selfie features. The phone bleeds tech and its supporting accessories catapult that richness to new style heights. The complementing Phonecore collection will be available in limited quantities for style seekers.
Most regular sunglasses only block UV rays, but not infrared rays from damaging your eyes. Kolari hopes to change that with their cutting-edge IR-blocking sunglasses that protect your eyes from the sun, and your face from unwanted facial recognition systems. Pretty cool, right?
When you wear regular sunglasses, the tinted lenses help cut the bright glare of the daytime sun. This does two things – it helps you see clearly without needing to half-shut your eyes, but it also makes your pupils dilate to let more light information in. Conventional sunglasses don’t do much to protect your eyes while they’re dilated in the daytime. The most glasses will ever do is block UV, blue light, and glare… but there’s one culprit that nobody focuses on, infrared. Humans don’t see infrared rays, but they can have long-term effects on your eyes. Sure, one can argue that you’d need high exposure to infrared rays, but think about how often you step out into the sun on a daily basis and all that begins adding up. While your regular Sunglass Hut shades won’t do much about IR rays, one company’s trying to make sunglasses safer for your eyes. Kolari Vision started its journey designing IR-protective accessories for cameras, but is now looking at the bigger picture by designing protective eyewear for everyone. The Kolari Shades are made from actual glass, and can block UV and up to 99% of infrared light from making its way into your eyes. This doesn’t impact the clarity with which you see, but it does help protect your vision… just like any sunglass should!
Designer: Ilija Melentijevic, PhD (founder of Kolari Vision)
Styled to look like a stylish pair of sunglasses, the Kolari Shades give your eyes the comfort and protection they need in the outdoors. “Our goal was to maximize clarity, eliminate color shifts, and block all unwanted wavelengths in order to give your eyes the most rested, neutral experience possible to minimize eye fatigue. Our beta testers are calling the result a breath of fresh air for your eyes,” say the folks at Kolari Vision. Originally founded as a photography company, the folks at Kolari realized that the gear made for cameras seemed to be better in quality than anything the eyewear industry produced. The irony being that your eyes are so much more precious than a $500 camera… so why is it that only camera sensors get taken such good care of, but not the original human cameras – our eyes??
Bridging that gap, the Kolari Shades offer a one-of-a-kind IR and UV protection to your eyes. The sunglasses are fitted with lenses that look just like your average tinted lenses, but they possess the unique ability to block anywhere between 90-99% of all infrared rays and 100% of all UV rays shining through the glass and into your eyes. The benefits of this are two-fold – there’s an obvious health benefit, given how eyes (just like skin) can respond adversely to excessive exposure to certain wavelengths of infrared light. However, a second benefit comes in the form of privacy protection. Most cameras rely on capturing some form of IR to ‘see’, and the shades can effectively block this ability. This prevents unwanted cameras from capturing facial recognition information without your consent. In fact, the iPhone relies on an IR blaster to power its FaceID unlocking feature – which can be disabled with the Kolari Shades. Sure, that means you need to either take off your sunglasses to unlock your phone (or just use the pattern lock instead), but the privacy implications are far-reaching too, as people like law enforcement can’t maliciously unlock your phone by holding it up to your face.
Kolari Shades are truly color-neutral and protect your eyes from all damaging wavelengths of light.
The beauty of the Kolari Shades is that their spectacles are made from actual glass – a distinction that sets it apart from even luxury eyewear. Most eyewear companies use a form of clear plastic for their lenses; a sensible choice because they’re scratch-resistant and they don’t shatter… but the one big caveat with these lenses lies their imperfections. Micro-imperfections in these lenses (even in the ones found in high-end tinted eyewear) can warp the way you see the world, which is why glass offers a MUCH better alternative. Kolari Vision’s lenses rely on industry-leading Corning Gorilla Glass (yes, the same durable one used in your phone) coupled with 51 layers of anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating. While Gorilla Glass can often be 10x more expensive than your standard plastic lenses, Kolari Vision’s still managed to keep their costs competitive, offering cutting-edge materials for the same price you’d pay for a pair of Ray-Bans.
Corning Gorilla Glass and titanium frames make the Kolari Shades extra tough.
The glasses aren’t the only durable part of the Kolari Shades either. The aviator-inspired eyewear sport frames are made from titanium, enhancing the overall durability to a level you’d probably find in smartphones (hint: the titanium iPhone 15 Pro and Galaxy S24 Ultra). You can choose between silver or gold-plated frames, while Kolari offers three lens options – a basic tinted-black (90% IR blocking), a bronze-tinted ultra lens (99% IR blocking), and an ultra gradient lens (with the same 99% IR blocking). The company’s working on newer frame designs and even plans on offering mirror-finish lenses that should take your eyewear’s swag to an entirely new level!
It might sound like an oxymoron, but your run-of-the-mill sunglasses don’t actually use glass. To comply with certain legal regulations, “shades,” as we sometimes call them, have to use plastic or resin materials that are more resilient but have poorer optical quality. That’s true even for those expensive sunglasses, which will probably make you feel a bit cheated, especially when you notice how unclear your vision behind these plastics really is. Thankfully, the optics industry has reached a point where we can have the best of both worlds of durability and optical clarity, creating the industry’s first modern sunglasses made from actual glass, designed to deliver clarity, comfort, and protection to your eyes with an accessible price point.
Designer: Ilija Melentijevic, PhD (founder of Kolari Vision)
These ‘plastic’ and ‘resin’ lenses come with a lot of responsibilities, given the fact that they’re tasked with protecting your eyesight. When you wear tinted sunglasses outdoors, your pupils dilate to let more light in – which effectively also exposes your eyes to more harmful rays… and while most lenses will block out UV rays, current sunglasses (even the expensive ones) aren’t designed to block infrared light from hitting your retina. It’s ironic that you can find IR-blocking lenses for your expensive cameras… but not for the most priceless camera we have: our eyes.
Enter Kolari Shades, a pair of sunglasses that is shaking up the market by bringing the highest-quality materials to a product you can actually afford. Harnessing more than a decade of experience in the photography space, Kolari brings a new kind of lens that is actually made of glass, providing the optical clarity that your eyes need all the time, whether you’re wearing sunglasses or not. But it’s not just plain glass, either, but the same ultra-strong Corning Gorilla Glass that has been protecting smartphone displays for years. And with 51 layers of anti-reflective and anti-smudge coating, your new premium specs are protected against scratches, dirt, dust, and more. Plus, it’s easy to clean the smudges off, too!
Kolari Shades are truly color-neutral and protect your eyes from all damaging wavelengths of light.
But while Kolari Shades’ glass lenses provide extra-clear vision, it doesn’t forget the protection that sunglasses are expected to bring. In fact, it levels up this aspect by blocking not only high-energy UV light but also low-energy infrared, both of which can be harmful to your sensitive eyes. It can even protect your privacy by blocking security cameras that use IR for face recognition. And it brings this superior protection without turning your world into a dreary shade of gray or brown. By using color-neutral coatings, you can stop worrying about those harmful and blinding rays and continue enjoying the world in full color.
Corning Gorilla Glass and titanium frames make the Kolari Shades extra tough.
The best part about the Kolari Shades is their affordable price tag, even though Kolari Shades are more costly to manufacture because of the premium materials used in the frames and lenses. It’s significantly less than luxury sunglasses that use plastic lenses, offer poorer optical quality, and strain your eyes in the long run. Why settle for plastic products that harm rather than protect your eyes when you can enjoy the optical quality that real glass lenses have to offer? With the Kolari Shades, you can enjoy durability, clarity, and protection in stylish sunglasses that don’t change the colors of your world.
Ever wondered what happens to that packet of Doritos or Lays once you throw it in the trash? Chances are nothing. Thin plastic packaging (especially the metallic multi-layered kind used for chips/crisps) is notoriously difficult to recycle… which is why realistically, almost 0% of it actually does end up being recycled. “This is because flexible packaging results in a low-value, high volume, composite waste – up to 5-6 different types of materials – that is considered economically and technically impossible to recycle,” explains Anish Malpani, founder and CEO of Ashaya – a social enterprise that aims to increase the value of waste through technological and scientific innovations in recycling. The India-based company has, however, spent the last two years tackling this problem head-on, arriving at a unique solution – a way to turn these low-value plastic packets into granules that can then be injection-molded into sunglasses. Meet the ‘Without rSunglasses’, the world’s first (and only) sunglasses made from packets of chips!
What makes the plastic packaging used for your chips so great, is also what makes it so dangerous. It’s designed to be flexible, lightweight, low-cost, and single-use. Great for the consumer, but not so much for the environment. Trillions of these packets end up in landfills each year, and there’s really nothing much we can do about it. These packets are a majority of the waste collected by waste-pickers too, adding strain to their jobs with no reward because there’s no value in a trashed plastic bag. The folks at Ashaya hope to change that.
The Without rSunglasses look like your typical stylish wayfarers, but as the name suggests, they’re made without virgin plastic, without guilt, without harming the environment, and without exploiting workers. Each pair of matte-black frames contains up to 5 recycled plastic packets that are thrown in the trash. Ashaya’s team of waste-pickers collect the trash from in and around the city of Pune, bring it to the lab, and process the plastic packets into ready-to-mold granules. The result is a pair of frames that look so perfect, you’d think they’re made from virgin plastic… and thanks to Ashaya’s unique business model, the waste-pickers also benefit directly from all of the rSunglasses’ sales.
The frames are made using a patent-pending process that doesn’t just recycle plastic, it invigorates it too. Ashaya’s team chemo-mechanically extracts materials from plastic waste, converting the waste into high-end products that feel just like regular plastic and have the same long-lasting properties too. Each pair of spectacles recycles up to 5 packets of plastic, and although that might not sound like much, the Ashaya team is hoping to scale the technology up. The Without rSunglasses are just their first product, with plans for other plastic items in the pipeline.
UNDP estimates that India alone generates 65 million tonnes of waste each year
The patent-pending chemo-mechanical process to extract plastic from single-use packets
The sunglasses aren’t the only bit of innovation here. Ashaya actually hires its own waste-pickers, pretty much covering the entire supply chain. These otherwise marginalized professionals are made a part of Ashaya’s operations in a more substantive way, with the company following a profit-sharing model with the waste-pickers, ensuring that they’re compensated fittingly for their work. Profits from the sales of Without rSunglasses go towards helping the children of waste-pickers get a quality education, ensuring they have a bright future.
“Waste pickers in India are the backbone of the recycling industry in the country yet there is no formal economy for them. They are informally employed – no contract, no protective gear, no health insurance, while earning only daily wages based on the type of waste they encounter,” says Malpani. “It’s also a generational occupation – once you’re a waste picker, there’s a high probability your child will also become a waste-picker.”
“Our mission at Ashaya is to increase the value of waste, and fairly redistribute that value to stakeholders in the supply chain, especially those who are the most exploited: waste-pickers; to bring them permanently out of the cycle of poverty, while also making our planet better,” Malpani adds.
Designed as a part of their Iconic Machined Series, the sunglasses come machined from a solid block of aluminum, giving them their distinctly edgy, futuristic aesthetic. Each pair of glasses sports an outline-style frame with a single-piece lens sitting in the middle, connecting both eyes right above the nose-bridge. The glasses come from Porsche Design, a luxury lifestyle brand created by F.A. Porsche, the grandson of the legendary automotive company’s founder. In keeping with the Porsche family tradition, these sunglasses are limited to just 911 units and go for $1600 CAD ($1192 USD) a pop…
Designer: Porsche Design
The glasses, dubbed P’8951, are the first of Porsche Design’s Iconic Machined series. Unlike most metal glasses that are simply formed from metal wire or stamped from metal sheets, these bad-boys are CNC-machined from solid metal. This undoubtedly has a few pros and cons. The pro is that CNC machining presents absolutely no design constraints, which explains the P’8951’s drop-dead gorgeous style. The con, however, is that this manufacturing method makes the sunglasses significantly heavier, as well as more expensive… but what is a thousand bucks to a true Porsche aficionado?! I also wouldn’t want to be caught wearing all-metal glasses in a heat-wave.
There’s an obvious comparison to be made to the Cybertruck here, given that both the sunglasses and the truck’s design share quite a few similarities. Both have a nude metallic finish, capped with tinted glass, and are dominated by edgy, angular contours. The most palpable difference, regrettably, is the fact that the P’8951 sunglasses are currently shipping, while the Cybertruck still remains nowhere in sight.
Razer is always open to new collaborations and experimental gear for gamers, marking the American-Singaporean company high up on the radar of tech and gaming community. While their last venture into fashion wearable accessories in the form of Razer Ansu Smart Glasses didn’t fair as well as they hoped, they aren’t giving up yet.
The gaming accessories maker has got in collaboration with Italian eyewear brand Retrosuperfuture to design a pair of fashion eyewear for Gen-Z gamers who like to show off their personality. Perhaps, a perfect confluence of gaming and fashion culture that isn’t going to fade away anytime soon.
According to Addie Tan, Associate Director of Business Development at Razer, they’ve collaborated with renowned fashion and lifestyle brands in the past and launched their own lines of apparel too. He said that the first-ever eyewear equips gamers right from their gaming sessions to their everyday activities in the “quest to outfit every aspect of the gamers’ world.”
The glasses by the two big brands are curated by D-CAVE, a renowned community trending for its reference lifestyle space for Web 3.0 users. Thus, reaffirming the fusion of the gaming world in “contemporary fashion, further positioning it at the center of contemporary pop culture.”
Unlike the Ansu Smart glasses, there’s no fancy tech fitted inside the eyewear, and it’s a mere fashion accessory to go with your other Razer gaming setup and merchandise. Christened Razersuperfuture, these sunglasses are fitted with photochromatic lenses, making them ideal for indoor gaming frenzy as well as outdoor use. They also feature blue light protection to keep your eyes from harm’s way while gaming in a dark setup with the screen brightness turned to the maximum.
The lack of any geeky features in this fashion eyewear by Razer is made up by the visual design. They have a mask-like silhouette drawing inspiration from the sportswear styling and the hip urban streetwear vibe. Those chunky acetate rims and uniquely serialized temples are complemented by the tagline,” For Gamers. By Gamers,” inscribed on the lenses in the iconic green branding.
Razersuperfuture is going to be available starting this week from 5 May at select Retrosuperfuture stores and Razer’s online portal. For a price tag of $239, it is far more expensive than the Anzu Smart Glasses which are available for as low as $59.99. But then, here we are talking of perceived value rather than the actual value-for-money proposition of a product.
Constraints form a major part of a designer’s process. Whether it’s constraints based on materials, manufacturing capabilities, technology, or even just budget constraints, designers work well within those boundaries to create the best solutions possible… but what if there were absolutely no constraints? What if everything was left open to possibility? That’s what designer and educator John Mauriello shows with this video, where the sky is practically the limit. Relying on $200,000 printers from Stratasys, and technology that’s so cutting edge that consumers can barely afford it, Mauriello created the wildest set of sunglasses we’ve ever seen. Ergonomics, aesthetics, and design guidelines be damned, Mauriello’s sunglasses are absolute statement pieces, showcasing the themes of earth, wind, fire, and water. Moreover, they explore a set of circumstances that most designers don’t get to explore – a highly elusive ‘what-if’ scenario where money, material, and manufacturing are all open-ended.
Before we begin, none of these glasses are designed for the mass market. In fact, they’re experiments that aren’t for sale… but instead, form a core part of Mauriello’s design exploration and education approach. You can follow John’s YouTube page “Design Theory” to learn more… and if you want to design and print your own frames without shelling out $20,000 for a fancy top-of-the-line printer, scroll to the bottom of the article to learn more about Xometry – a website that 3D prints your designs and delivers them to your doorstep.
A lot of a person’s emotions get expressed through their eyes, and sunglasses hide that. It’s why people wearing sunglasses look mysterious to the extent of appearing ‘cool’. That became the starting point for Mauriello’s ideation. “That’s actually why I came up with the four elements idea,” he said. “I liked the idea of a natural disaster happening around your face, but you still look cool and calm and collected to the outside world. Plus I really liked Captain Planet as a kid…”
To design these outlandish sunglasses, Mauriello resorted to an unconventional design direction that he just wouldn’t get to explore with a paying client. It involved a lot of sketching directly in VR using Gravity Sketch, before taking the templates into Houdini to actually simulate effects like fire, wind, water, and earth. For Fire, Mauriello experimented with flames, embers, and sparks before settling on a combination of red flames encased within clear flames. It honestly looks like a fire inside the clear spectacles is causing them to melt.
The Earth sunglasses are pretty self-explanatory, and come with a cracked surface that looks like chiseled rock formations. Unlike the Fire sunglasses that have an almost sinister aesthetic (the kind you’d see on a supervillain), the Earth glasses have a stable, grounded, rectangular form factor that’s made a tad bit more interesting by the cracks in its surface.
The Water sunglasses have a bubble-like aesthetic to them, with liberal rounded edges and forms; and instead of relying only on simulations, they use a bit of AI-generated art too. The splashes inside the clear frames were made in Houdini itself, but the colors and textures on the splashes were generated using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Rather than taking stock images, Mauriello sought to create his own, giving the glasses an added layer of uniqueness.
The Wind sunglasses too use AI-generated textures in the colored elements of the frames. The colored elements, designed to look like wisps of smoke, are trapped in a clear frame that has an aerodynamic shape, with ribs running along the front that looks like a wind-tunnel test come to life. Look inside and you see these incredible wispy forms inside, looking like the glass marbles we played with as kids. Creating this without 3D printing seems downright impossible.
Mauriello was approached by Stratasys, who let him use their J55 printers to build out designs. The J55 is the company’s high-end full-color multi-material printer that prints in ‘voxels’ instead of sliced layers. This allows the printers to meticulously build designs with multiple materials, finishes, textures, and colors all in one stretch – a feature that was integral to Mauriello’s project.
The J55 also allowed Mauriello to build out multiple samples in one stretch, giving him the ability to test out colors, finishes, and other details. Mauriello printed multiple variations of each element, looking at colors, transparency, and overall finish to help him tweak his own models. “You can experiment with a huge range of ideas and one of them is likely to be what you want,” he explained.
Once the samples were ready, Mauriello had them fitted with lenses to complete each sunglass. The glasses don’t have hinges on them, and are unibody (so they can’t be folded), but they are absolutely wearable, and Mauriello even got feedback from a pro eyewear designer on the forms and the overall design language of each elemental sunglass.
The entire project was a collaborative effort between Mauriello and Stratasys, who were kind enough to loan their state-of-the-art multi-material printers to him to showcase their overall capabilities. If you want to make designs just like these, Stratasys does offer a ‘Manufacturing On-Demand’ option that lets you generate an instant quote based on your parts. Alternatively, companies like Xometry have a global network of over 10,000 CNC manufacturers, 3D printers, molders, and other equipment that you can access, for everything from 3D printing to CNC machining and even mold-making. Envisioned to be just as easy as ordering a product online, Xometry lets you upload your model onto their Instant Quoting Engine and have the part delivered to your doorstep in a matter of days. Click here to know more!
It’s almost too easy to take for granted the way clothing and apparel can affect the environment. After all, they aren’t completely made from plastic, though some are made from synthetic non-biodegradable fibers. Textile, however, uses a lot of water, energy, and toxic chemicals, and the denim material that makes up our favorite jeans is one of those culprits. Given how many of us go through dozens of clothes a year or just how many unsold clothes are made annually, the potential for textile to overrun landfills is frighteningly high. Of course, we can always recycle them, but few people and companies actually do that. Fortunately, there is also a rising trend of upcycling used products or material waste, like this startup that turns fashionable jeans into fashionable sunglasses.
Denim has unique material and visual properties that make it an interesting ingredient in many products or artworks that aren’t related to clothing. The unique patterns and rough texture of denim make it easily distinguishable among other textiles, so anything that “wears” it will make one immediately think of jeans. As it turns out, it’s also possible to turn denim into other objects with the right mix of ingredients that make it almost as tough as plastic but exponentially more eco-friendly.
Mosevic was born from a desire to reduce the negative impact of wasted denim material on the environment, even by just a little bit. Just like how layers of carbon fibers mixed with resin have become a common material used in engineering, the “Shades of Denim” collection is made from layers of waste denim infused with bio-resin and then pressed to become a solid structure. The resulting material is then machined into the individual parts that make up the eyewear and then connected with specially-designed metal reinforcements.
The resulting “Solid Denim” material retains many of the desirable properties of denim, like the patterns of cotton fibers formed when cutting through the material, as well as the texture and appearance of denim. However, unlike typical denim, these pieces are finished with hard natural wax that makes them resistant to water and oils, such as those on your skin or sunscreen. For all intents and purposes, these sunglasses are like your typical shades, except that they look like designer accessories because of their unique flair.
The Mosevic sunglasses give old jeans and waste denim a new home and delay their eventual fate in landfills. That said, the entire process isn’t yet completely sustainable, both in an environmental way and in business terms. The sunglasses are handmade in small batches, a process that takes up to two weeks to finish. Fortunately, there are plans to scale up and make the process more efficient for larger numbers, which ultimately translates to more denim material being upcycled.
Given the amount of denim used, however, it still wouldn’t put a dent in the textile waste problem. Every little bit counts, though, and the use of textile in this manner could spark the imagination and creativity of other designers to come up with ways to upcycle materials and transform them into something new and something beautiful.
