OS: How did the new collaboration with Oli come about?
TB: Yeah, so we're really excited to be working with Oli and the Oliver Spencer team. It came about just meeting Oli and getting on so well with him. He had this pair of vintage frames from his archive, an old Oliver Spencer frame, with a kind of boxy saddle bridge, and we chatted about it and we thought, well, wouldn't this be a great opportunity for us to reimagine and reinvent that vintage frame, make a few tweaks around the sizing, but bring back to life what is a really classic Oliver Spencer style. And so that's what we've done, made a really small, beautiful range of that particular silhouette and we can't wait to see them on people's faces.
OS: If you could change the eyewear industry for the better overnight, what would you do?
TB: The big thing for me is if you could make frames last longer. I think that would transform people's relationship with glasses. When you go back historically, frames were made to last for decades, and they were often the most expensive thing that people owned so they would look after them for decades. If a hinge broke, they'd repair it. If an arm broke, they'd repair it. Over the last 40 or 50 years, like many other industries, eyewear has moved away from that concept towards something more about replacement than renewal or repair, and I think that's wrong. It creates this sense that glasses are a disposable thing, whereas actually I think one of the most beautiful things about a pair of glasses is that they can outlive the wearer.
When I think about the people that got me excited about glasses when I was first learning about them, they were famous for an iconic style, whether it was James Dean wearing his Universal Optical tortoiseshells in the 1950s, or or Morrissey and his NHS '524' frames in the eighties, or Michael Caine. So I think by solving the sort of tyranny of disposing of glasses, and make them last longer, you'll encourage people to have a pair of spectacles that they can grow old with.
OS: What work goes into a pair of Cubitts frames from start to finish?
TB: So a pair of Cubitts frames go through about 50 stages, which generally take about four to six weeks to complete. It always starts with trying to find the best materials, normally it's cellular acetate, but it could be titanium, it could be horn, it could be an experimental material. You start with the milling process, so turning that material into a sheet material and then milling that away to form a front and some sides. And then it's a whole bunch of different processes, some done by machine, many done by hand, to try and get to a kind of final frame as you'd recognize it now.
The finish is one of the most important things. What turns the frame from this three-dimensional object into something beautiful? It's getting the right polish, it's getting the right luster, it's getting the right angle between the front and the temple, and doing all of that in a way that brings consistency and uniformity to the final product, before you obviously turn it into either a pair of sunglasses or spectacles with the lenses. We're very, very particular about the lenses we use and only work with Zeiss and Carl Zeiss. Hopefully all of those different stages compound and end up creating a product that people are super proud to put on their faces.
The new Oliver Spencer x Cubitts 'Conduit' frames are made by hand at the Cubitts London workshop in Mazzuchelli cellulose acetate, using structural double dot rivets, and OBE hardware from Germany. Each frame features a hand-chamfered browline, angular lugs, and hockey-end temples engraved with the Oliver Spencer coordinates, and come finished with Carl Zeiss lenses, offering full UV protection. The Soller style comes in three different colours - amber tortoiseshell, chocolate tortoiseshell, and black - and is available now in Oliver Spencer stores and online at oliverspencer.co.uk.
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