Vintage for your face

I had been wearing a pair of Arnette sunglasses for the last 4 years and it was time to give them a rest, so i  went looking for something different. Enter the PERSOL 649´s.

I stumbled on these by accident and decided i needed to have them. Very cool, very vintage and definitely worth the price. Fashions come and go but great design is timeless.

Here´s a little history from the company website.

"Persol Model 649s, designed for tram drivers in Turin who needed large glasses to protect their eyes against wind and dust, first hit the stores in 1957.

The uniqueness of the 649 design made it an instant success, and many knock-offs were created by Persol's competitors.

Persol, founded in the early 1920s, started out making aviator glasses for the Italian Air Force and racing googles for the legendary Italian driver Fangio. In 1961 Persols became iconic when Marcello Mastroianni wore them in the film "Divorce Italian Style."

The 649's lenses are made of real crystal and have the Persol trademark arrowhead etchings in the corners. The collapsible frames also sport the patented "Meflecto" joints, Meflecto GTOs to be precise.

The particular Persols McQueen wore in that ultracool crime caper "The Thomas Crown Affair" were actually customs, with icy blue lenses, made by Hollywood eyeglass designer Dennis Roberts. Roberts, the owner of Optique Boutique, made 800 (not a typo!) pairs of sunglasses for McQueen alone in his lifetime, many of them riffs on the popular Persols. He also created outlandish eyeware for Elton John, Elvis Presley (including the famous TCB glasses), one-eyed Black Rat Packer Sammy Davis, Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Liberace, Peter Sellers, Bobby Darin, Cary Grant, Jim Morrison, and John Belushi (the yellow-tinted "Bees"), among others. "