Anne et Valentin

Some houses correct your sight. Anne et Valentin decided to wake it up. Born in Toulouse in 1980 from the meeting of two opticians who refused to be bored, the house has spent forty years proving that a pair of glasses could be a gesture of style before it is an optical device.

Here, colour is never afraid of itself. Shapes allow themselves to be bold — a square that spills over, a round that rounds further still, a temple that veers off because it is more beautiful that way. Every frame is conceived as an architecture for the face: nothing is left to chance, everything serves the gaze of the person wearing it.

The designs are drawn in Toulouse and made in France and Japan, in a thick, living acetate whose hues look as though they were mixed by hand. To wear Anne et Valentin is not to hide behind your glasses. It is to choose them the way you choose a signature.

A house for those who believe a pair of glasses never has to be discreet to be elegant.