The loudest thing about a pair of glasses used to be the name on the temple. That has been quietly reversing for several years, and the frames people are choosing now tend to announce themselves through material, proportion and construction instead. It is a real shift rather than a marketing one, and it is worth knowing what to look at.
What the understated turn actually is
Smaller logos, or none. Colour drawn from the material rather than applied to it. Hardware that is engineered rather than decorated. The idea is that a frame should reward a second look rather than demand the first one — which is a more durable proposition, because a frame you notice immediately is a frame you eventually stop noticing.
How to recognise it in the hand
- Hinges that are integrated into the design rather than screwed on afterwards, and that feel damped rather than loose
- Acetate with depth — hold it to the light and the colour should run through the material rather than sit on the surface
- Titanium and beta-titanium, which allow much finer sections at the same strength and are noticeably lighter on the nose
- Edges that are polished all the way round, including the parts nobody sees
- Temple tips that are shaped rather than simply cut, which is what makes a frame comfortable after four hours
- A maker’s mark inside the temple rather than a logo outside it
Why it suits more people
A quieter frame is less dependent on being the right frame for this year, which means it dates more slowly. It also tends to work across more of your life — the same pair reads correctly in a meeting and at a dinner — which matters when you wear one object for fourteen hours a day.
The thing it is easy to get wrong
Understated is not the same as small, and this is where people go astray. A frame that is too narrow for your face is not quiet, it is ill-fitting, and it makes a face look wider. The scale still has to be right; restraint applies to the decoration, not to the proportions. Getting scale right is worth reading alongside this.
And it is not automatically expensive
Some of the most restrained frames we stock are not the costliest, and some very expensive frames are extremely loud. The vocabulary of understatement has become a marketing register in its own right, which means the word is now applied to things that have only the appearance of it. Look at the hinge and the edge finish; those are harder to fake than a muted colourway.
Where our own collection sits
STOTTS. Atelier is our own collection of eyewear, and it is deliberately quiet — restrained shapes, materials chosen to age well, our mark inside the temple rather than outside. You can see it alongside everything else we stock in the eyewear collections.
A frame that shouts is a frame you will get tired of. A frame that rewards a second look is one you will still like in five years.← Back to the Journal
