Rimless

Rimless lives best in motion, and our campaign was shot in New York to texture at full velocity. Chrome and grime; neon and nicotine; diamonds under fluorescent strip lights.

Photographed by Anton Renborg, the campaign spans a handful of locations that could only be New York - the Diamond District in Midtown, Big Bar in East Village, Sake Bar Asoko in the Lower East Side, and the Low Cinema, Ridgewood.

Each place has its own grain; each subject their own rhythm. 

For most of their history, spectacles were unapologetically framed.

Early lenses were thick, heavy discs of glass, held in horn, metal, or wood. The frame was not an optional extra; it was a survival mechanism. Until the nineteenth century, the closest thing to “rimless” were devices like pince-nez and lorgnettes - lenses gripped by the nose or held on a handle, more jewellery than everyday tool, often worn as much to be seen as to see.

True rimless spectacles emerged in the late nineteenth century. Advances in metalworking and precision drilling allowed opticians to do something previously unthinkable: drill directly into the lens, and mount the bridge and temples with tiny screws or bushings.

The result was the three-piece mount - two lenses and a bridge, with no rim at all. These new frames answered several questions at once. They were lighter on the nose in an era of thick glass lenses; they were cheaper in materials; and, crucially, they were less visible on the face.


This last point mattered. In Victorian and Edwardian society, spectacles still carried a stigma. To wear them openly was to admit to frailty, age, or studiousness in a way not everyone welcomed, especially women.

Rimless frames promised a compromise: improved sight without the social announcement. Advertising of the period leant heavily on words like “invisible”, “skeleton”, and “natural”, offering glasses that would politely disappear.

By the early twentieth century, rimless spectacles had become the uniform of serious professionals - doctors, civil servants, men of the law - the frames of authority that tried not to look like frames at all. Small round or oval lenses floated in front of the eyes, attached to delicate wire temples. In contrast, bold horn-rim and later acetate frames shouted modernity and personality; rimless sat on the opposite side of the spectrum, a quiet, conservative choice.

After the Second World War, plastics took centre stage. Browlines, cat-eyes, and thick acetates came to define mid-century modern eyewear. Rimless never disappeared, but it slipped to the margins: a staple of conservative opticians and those who still longed for near-invisibility.

Their revival came with materials. From the 1970s onwards, lighter plastic lenses and high-performance metals like titanium made rimless mountings stronger, more comfortable, and less prone to cracking. German and Japanese makers in particular refined the drill-mount frame into a precise piece of engineering. By the 1990s and early 2000s, rimless had acquired a new persona: coolly technical, almost surgical.

Today, rimless remains the purest expression of the spectacle as instrument, with all non-essential removed.