Ephemera

The contemporary eyewear labels' refined looks are embraced by the likes of J Balvin, Billie Eilish, Kaytranada and more. With a label turning the heads of some of the biggest stars, one has to wonder, who is the mastermind behind all of these pieces?

office caught up with the founder and creative director behind this forward-thinking brand and had an in depth chat about where it all began, sustainability, inspirations, and more.

Check out the interview below.

What is the overarching theme of your work and where did your design journey begin?

The overall inspiration was brutalist architecture and specifically with kitchen design. A lot of the inspiration comes from that, it’s minimalism combined with the kitchen aesthetics and brutalist architecture. It wasn’t originally planned to be specifically eyewear, it was organic for me. I like eyewear in general and this was my interpretation of eyewear. I wanted to use materials that aren’t usually used, like rubber, thick titanium, and 3D printing that’s functional. Right now we’re doing the fragrance with the candles, we went to the south of France where the fragrance lab is and we fell in love with the process and we wanted to do something that wasn’t done before so we sourced aluminum and went in that direction. So, a lot of it is organic and a gut feeling, not necessarily a full strategy and we work better this way. Our next product is actually jewelry but again, this idea was organic as well.

We live in a world where it is imperative that we adopt a more sustainable mindset to reduce the waste of materials. Have you implemented sustainability into your work?

So that’s actually one of our main things, I just don’t like to market ourselves as a fully sustainable brand because we’re not and I think a lot of people use it as a marketing thing. We’re trying out best with the materials that we’re using so we reduced plastic from our original packaging by about 80%, so we don’t really have any plastic components in our packaging. In terms of the actual product, we mostly use aluminum and stainless steel, which is sustainable. However, we still have a few acetate models within the eyewear and now it’s 70:30 more metals and we’re trying to reduce that as we go and as we’re able to. The easiest thing for us is to actually do the packaging first because a lot of people waste a lot of plastics with that and never really think about it, so we tackled that and we’re working on other things as we go.

Your designs have a playful mixture of ultra modernism and futuristic elements to them 一 it’s sexy, but in the most refined way. What makes this such an irresistible combination for you and the consumer?

Firstly, I’d like to say the references that my team uses are crazy and we have a head designer, Lily Max. She's really cool and I would say she’s on the more playful side while I’m more on the brutalist side. It’s a combination of our two thoughts with what we produce and for me, I didn’t want to take a monotone direction, I didn’t want to exclusively focus on metals and silver and be super minimal all the time. I wanted to do a mix and showcase that we can implement colors 一 actually, our color products have been selling almost as good, sometimes better, for example, with our bold red, we did a 3D printed pair, it’s a really bright red color and it always sells out. This made us realize that this is something we should do and now we’re heavily into color and we’re finding that balance.

I love the concepts of each design. How do you come up with these ideas and how long does one design usually take?

We’re very content-driven, so weirdly, sometimes the actual designs are inspired by the content. So, say a specific shoot that we really like, or even artwork 一 we try to transfer those inspirations into our products. I don’t think the products are just the physical thing itself, it’s a 360 because you can see a product shot in a certain way and you like it more. So, I think we’re more visual in terms of how we want it to be seen and then we design based on imagining how that would fit. Aside from that, we have the technical aspect, which Lily our head designer is super good at, she 3D models the product and we actually 3D print it so that we have a rapid prototype because eyewear takes about 90 days to get produced. It’s kind of like slow fashion, we see the physical product and we tweak it and then it goes to manufacturing.

Fashion has drastically changed over the past few years. You know, eyewear brands like yours or even Gentle Monster have completely shifted the way we look at things. How do you feel like you witnessed the evolution of it?

I think firstly we have a new wave of brands that don’t really depend on big wholesalers or brands that don’t really do a big showroom to get noticed. I’d say Gentle Monster started that with their stores and they just went crazy with that and it was a full experience. For us, we mostly showcased ourselves on Instagram but overall, designers are going down a more experimental and experiential path. It’s more in your hands, you can make it and succeed or not, but you don’t need that channel to depend on the store to buy your products for you to be popping. I still think having wholesalers is still good overall because it gives you exposure in different ways that you don’t know about and people want to touch the product in real life, so I still think physicality is a thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong but The combination of conceptual and inventive detailing seems to be the core elements of your work. Why are these elements so important for you to explore?

Definitely and firstly, we enjoy the super technical side of it and we try to prove that we’re all about precision, which is our signature. For me specifically, it’s always been about being precise and not doing something with 90% effort, we want things at 100% like a finished product. It just keeps evolving in general but we wanted to explore other avenues that weren’t traditionally in eyewear like engraving on the inside and not just printing on the frames or on the temples. Just going the extra mile and layer and treating and treating our eyewear almost like sneakers. You know, we have hype for eyewear almost like sneakers and with eyewear, we discovered that it has its own cult following as well.

How have your designs helped you morph your vision into a living, breathing reality? In other words, back in 2018 when you first started the brand what was Xander thinking?

I don’t think it was ever really fashion, in the beginning, it was more like, ‘okay we’ll just do a couple of products’ and we were actually doing events. At first, we just placed our products on some cool people that we knew and it just took off online. I'd say it was more of a content-type brand but then it fully turned into a product that we spent way more time on developing and finding the correct manufacturers that support certain complexities. This was actually one of the biggest challenges because it’s hard to find a correct partner but it definitely paid off. I think it has definitely evolved from content to product.

Your modern interpretations of the line between masculinity and femininity bleed through your designs and its versatility is constantly blurring the preconceived ideas that most have about fashion. Everything is unisex. How do you continue to shatter these perceptions?

I think in general, fluidity is in front of us, things change all the time. We’re never really designing for men or women, it’s always unisex and it’s crazy because, from a content perspective, we usually shoot a lot of females, which wasn’t really planned. We just knew a lot of female models and a lot of them actually aren’t signed, we just photograph people who look cool to us. It just kind of evolved like that but weirdly, our sales are 50/50 split between men and women but men also buy a lot just based on the female content. I don’t think things are correlated like the book, I think it’s all about doing what you think is cool and whoever gets on board is kind of your customer, instead of trying to cater to the commercial audience. I think commerciality is changing, like, people come to you, instead of you going to them.

Where do you hope to take your designs in the near future? What can you tell us about any future collections that you have coming out?

For now, we have a lot of eyewear coming up and the fragrance line is expanding as well. Right now we have candles and we’re dropping a fragrance toy and it’s a ceramic dragon, which evolved from a CGI creature that we did for online content, we got a lot of good dm’s and then we actually did a ceramic version of that takes in fragrance oil and then it diffuses and we’re dropping that next month. So, we’re really just exploring these fragrance stories and doing things that a lot of people aren’t really focused on. We also have the jewelry that we’ve been working on for about 6 months and we’re also working on a sneaker collab. We hope to launch this collaboration in 2022 but obviously, there is a lot of politics around that because it’s with a bigger brand, but yeah, we designed it and they approved it and we’re just waiting for them to give us a date.