Gai Gherardi, Who Made Eyeglass Frames Fashion Statements, Dies at 78

Gai Gherardi, an optician from Los Angeles who with a partner attracted a clientele of celebrities by pioneering the idea that the glasses of the glasses should not be boring but rather it could be fashion declarations of individuality, died on March 16 in his house in Hollywood. He was 78 years old.

His sister, Heather Gherardi, said the cause was the biliary duct cancer, which he learned that he had last month.

“Glasses allow spontaneity”, Mrs. Gherardi He told the New York Times magazine In 1993. “They offer the possibility of a multitude of changes in your person; they are an excellent accessory, excellent support”.

“The contacts are rigid. They are not fun,” he added. “You could see better in them, but you can’t have a better appearance in them.”

A Gregaria personality who dressed in bold colors, Mrs. Gherardi opened her shop, The eyeworksOn Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979 with her friend and optical partner Barbara McReynolds. Mrs. Gherardi guided the design of trendy and limited edition frames that are known for their sharp corners, unusual shapes and surprising shades marketed with playful names, such as Rooster, Whirly Bird and MX. Busy. In 1993, the shop began to use laser to affect the metal frames with motifs, such as southern California maps and the United States.

“The frames are both an expression of pure opulence and a secret word of code between related individuals”, Dave Schilling wrote In 2022 in the image, the Los Angeles Times style magazine, “indicating that you took a sense of humor on you, that you are different too”.

The first popularity of the shop between artists, actors, architects and LGBTQ communities has been improved since the early 1980s by a Press advertising campaignStill ongoing in fashion magazines, which have characterized more than 200 black and white portraits of celebrities and other luminaries who wear glasses of Eyeworks. Photographed by Greg Gorman, they included Chaka Khan, Rupaul, David Hockney, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones e Paul ReubensFamous for his character Pee-Wee Herman.

The slogan of the campaign: “A face is like a great work of art. It deserves a great frame.”

Gorman said that Andy Warhol had asked to be in the countryside, that she was launched in the interview magazine of Mr. Warhol and has extended to other fashionable magazines and aware of fashion such as paper and details.

“Part of the challenge was to find frames that completed the face of the person,” said Gorman in an interview. “Sometimes Gai came with extravagant glasses and we always found a way to catapult them on people’s faces.”

Shop customers included Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Billy Idol and Carrie Fisher. Elton John, who is known for his outrageous glasses, has also made purchases in the shop, where a design was made for him in a personalized color.

After the death of Mrs. Gherardi, The Council of Stilists He described it as a “key figure in the glasses sector”. He helped the advice to form a subgroup of glasses designer in 2014 and was part of a philanthropic company that donated over $ 100,000 to LGBTQ causes.

Blake Kuwehara, a glasses designer who collaborated with Mrs. Gherardi and three others on rainbow themed sunglasses for the month of Pride Month in 2023, he declared in a declaration of having “turned on a path for the designers of independent glasses”, adding: “He was great, graceful and giving at every round”.

Gai Travelle Gherardi was born on July 8, 1946 in Los Angeles and grew up about an hour south to Huntington Beach. His mother, Millicent (Selby) Gherardi, owned a women’s fashion shop. His father, Fabio Frank Gherardi, built residential homes and led a band that called Fabio’s Big Band.

Gai sailed to Huntington Beach and got his first job there, in a disco called The Golden Bear, where he remembered seeing Lenny Bruce perform. He met Mrs. Mcreynolds at the Huntington High School and became intimate friends. When Mrs. Mcreynolds got a job in a optical store in Newport Beach in 1965, Mrs. Gherardi also helped to be hired there.

Mrs. Gherardi described by providing glasses for her customers as an almost mystical experience.

“I can’t explain it,” he said in an interview in 2017 with Art Matters Foundation, of which he was a member of the Council. “Put your glasses on someone, touch your head and look in their eyes.” He added: “Eyes and glasses and glasses have started to become this way of communicating”.

But, he said, the design of the frame in his first days of glasses was at most prosaic.

“People wore truck mack in the face then”, she He told Los Angeles Times in 2002. “The choice was mainly among forms of butterfly in pink with rhinestones and basic models in black shell or turtle.”

During the Vietnam War, she and Mrs. Mcreynolds held meetings of revisites of drafts and helped young people avoid military service by providing them with glasses with prescriptions that gave them what she called “shaky” vision.

After working together with Newport Beach, Mrs. Gherardi hired work in other optical stores and Mrs. McRynolds worked for a lens company. However, one day they dreamed of opening their shop; Both were certified opticians.

In 1979, they found a place for the glasses of La Su Melrose Avenue and the father of Mrs. Gherardi built the shop for them.

Some of the first designs of the shop came from the tincture, in various colors, from a series of neutral color frames of the 1950s. “I’m just putting a color on them,” said Mrs. Gherardi, “and putting them on a beautiful woman who would never have worn something like that; suddenly” Oh, my God, “you’re just watching this as a design.”

Heather Gherardi, who is also an optical and who worked with his sister for 27 years, said in an interview: “He said:” Why be boring when can you have fun? “”

The Eyeworks has extended to three points of sale, but a second shop in Los Angeles closed in 2022 after 20 years, and another, in Costa Mesa, that Heather Gherardi managed, closed in 2009 after 21 years.

With an influx of artists who become customers, Mrs. Gherardi and Mrs. Mcreynolds have started organizing monthly art exhibitions in Eyeworks. And in 2009, the two women began to take artists-trains to whom Catherine Opie, Alison Saar, Barbara Kruger and Gabriela Ruiz-to transform the normal cleaning clothes of lenses into pieces of art in microfiber.

In addition to her sister, Mrs. Gherardi survived her life partner, Rhonda Saboff, and her stepsisters, Michelle and Rene Gherardi. Mrs. McRynolds retired from business a few years ago.

In 1984, Mrs. Gherardi was in the study of Mr. Gorman in Los Angeles when Divine, the drag Queen and the muse of director John Waters, arrived for a photo shoot for the campaign of La Eyeworks. He recalled that he saw Divine, whose birth name was Harris Glenn Milstead, arriving in a jacket and tie, without any trick or wig. Divine’s emergency three hours later, he said: “In this fantastic dress with pink sequins,” pushed her to tears.

“It was the most transformative moment,” he told Image Magazine. “And in part it was this overwhelming feeling of how everyone negotiates and sailing to beauty.”