At Seconde Vue, we love vintage, more specifically vintage glasses, but you already know that. Today we invite you to take a look at the glasses collection of a passionate, Christophe Pinon.
Christophe has been collecting Oakley sunglasses since the 90s, when he worked as an advertising manager at Moto Verte before becoming advertising director at Moto Journal. So we went to take a look at this crazy collection and took the opportunity to ask him a few questions!
Christophe has a considerable number of Oakley glasses in his wardrobe, around 150 pairs. Obviously, faced with so many glasses we couldn't resist and we asked him :
Which pair is his favorite? The one that stands out from the crowd.
"Go and choose from one of your children, impossible!" Christophe replied with humor.
Why did you fall in love with Oakley models?
"Oakley started in motocross and I also started in motocross. And it so happens that I was given a pair of glasses from the brand, the first one, and from that moment on, I found at the time 35 years ago, that it was a great brand of glasses, that it was way ahead of its time. It was above all the avant-gardism that these models of glasses demonstrated through their design and their materials that seduced me at the time and that continue to seduce me. I was given my first pair in 1989, an E-wire. A frame that is certainly a little marked by time but which I hold very dear and which has a special place in my collection."
Christophe wears his first E-Wire frame.
But one pair is not enough to start a collection. So, the question for us was why embark on this search for Oakley glasses models?
"In motorcycling, I was lucky enough to know the people at Oakley and every year they gave me a pair, as I worked on the circuits and especially because they knew how much I loved the brand. And when Oakley France closed about 20 years ago, I was offered to recover some pairs. That's how I recovered incredible glasses, there are pairs in there that are impossible to find, that are almost unique."
If Christophe couldn't define which was his favorite pair, he was able to tell us which were his most original, most iconic pairs in his collection.
"The first is a frame with an integrated MP3 player "this one was really avant-garde, you can listen to your music through your glasses!" Then, he revealed his collection of X-Metal models "it's the entire Oakley steel collection, these are glasses with incredibly high-quality steel made of titanium with polarized lenses, there are Romeos, Juliets, I think I have almost all of them!"
The X-Metal collection.
The built-in MP3 mount.
For Christophe, glasses are more than an essential accessory to his look, they form the basis of his identity in a certain way.
An identity that he finds behind the fact that "Oakley has a particularity compared to other eyewear brands, there is a whole environment that has been created from eyewear. Oakley makes clothes, backpacks, watches, magnificent watches that are real works of art. So compared to other brands, they all have a palette around eyewear, that is to say, they have declined eyewear beyond that. That's why it has become more than just a fashion, lifestyle item. And today, I don't see another eyewear brand in the world that has managed to generate that.
Moreover, the founder, Jim Jannard, launched competitions for his designers to invent something other than glasses.
Thus, Christophe benefits from a wide choice in his vintage glasses, as much on the style of the models, some simpler, others more fanciful, as on the materials used in the creation of these different pairs. He has an exceptional collection of which most of his frames are at least 20 years old. Christophe's Oakley glasses are an integral part of his look, which we also found super trendy! So thank you Christophe for introducing us to your superb collection!
If you too are a fan of vintage glasses, come to the Seconde Vue showroom every Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. at 33 quai de la Tournelle 75005 to discover our selection of vintage glasses from the 1930s to the 2000s!
