Robb Recommends: The Handmade Eyewear That Got Me to Finally Embrace Glasses
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On Madison Avenue, behind a large brass door just north of 61st Street, there’s a portal to old New York—martini New York, town car New York, the one with all the shoulder pads and creative-class expense accounts. You can probably picture it: soft pendant lighting; rows of colorful eyeglasses peering out from vintage Shaker cabinets; a local woman, buffed to a high shine, trying on sunglasses with both hands back and forth, like windshield wipers, without ever leaning forward or uncrossing her legs. A small clutch of liquor bottles sits on the display case next to a bowl of hard candy, and Bob Balaban, in a gray wool three-piece suit, offers you a drink.
Morgenthal Frederics has several NYC locations, including an airy, modern boutique in SoHo, but the Madison Avenue shop is my favorite for the way it retains the quirky, clubby, cushion-cut feel of the Upper East Side as it existed in the era of La Grenouille and Richard Feigen. It’s the type of brand that still finds shouting about itself distasteful, despite the kinds of price tags and old-money bona fides that make it ripe for a name-drop in any of the myriad TV dramas, from Industry to White Lotus, in which luxury goods co-star.
Frederics Opticians opened in New York in 1913, the same year Ford started producing Model Ts in Detroit, but the brand known today as Morgenthal Frederics dates back to the former’s sale, in 1986, to eyewear designer Richard Morgenthal, who moved the label upmarket and with a particular specialty in buffalo horn. High-end retail boutiques followed in the 1990s, including the original Madison Ave flagship (roughly a block south of the current address in historic Carlton House) and in Beverly Hills. No less an eyewear and New York icon than Spike Lee is a longtime fan, as was architect I.M. Pei.
I sit down with the salesman—not Bob Balaban, in fact, but a dapper dead ringer named Matthew—and ask for what everyone seems to be asking for in eyewear these days: thick black frames with the size and shine of a Cadillac Escalade. These Matthew dutifully produces, then observes me cocking my head every which way as I try to figure out what about them doesn’t look quite right in the mirror. It’s not the frames, Matthew says, as much as my eyes, which he finds a very polite way of telling me are too close together.
“It’s not that you’d notice otherwise,” he demures, “but the wide frames create a magnifying effect—you can’t think of them like sunglasses because dark lenses allow you to get away with a lot more than you can with clear glass.”
Sunglasses are all I’ve ever known; these will be my first pair of actual glasses, which is why I figure they’re worth an investment—if nothing else, as someone who often finds a scarf to be flashy overkill, I could use the excuse of another accessory. So I follow Matthew’s advice and settle on a smaller, more conservative panto silhouette called the Waugh. (Many of the frames, from the Rushdie to the Brando, are named for writers, actors, and artists.) Following a series of in-store measurements and an eye exam, plus a few weeks of waiting, the glasses return with “Genuine Horn” stamped in gold on the inside of one arm and “Hand Made in Germany” on the other.
The sustainably sourced horn is lovely, lightweight and cool to the touch—a small but constant reminder of how much more pleasant natural materials feel against the skin. The rich, lightly striated green frames are subtly architectural, expertly shaped, and seamlessly meld a matte exterior with a highly polished inside finish. After a lifetime not wearing glasses I’m still not quite used to them, and I’ve yet to master that delicate semaphore of the eyeglass-wearer, all the dramatic adjustments and suggestive pointing. But they’re stylish and supremely comfortable—and, with transition lenses, quite practical; as sunglasses, the smaller horn frames have a distinct Old Hollywood vibe. As far as concessions to aging go, it’s hard to beat something that’s a genuine pleasure to handle—and if faraway street signs and small pets are easier to spot, all the better.
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