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We Loveoval sunglasses, are three times as thick
as my old go-to pair. “It creates a certain
physicality—when you touch the frame,
you connect with the luxury of it,” he says.
Mage’s devotion to the senses is evident
before you even try on a pair. Every detail,
down to the scent of the glasses, has
been considered: As soon as you open the
sturdy red satin box the specs arrive in,
you’re hit with a whiff of oud.
Mage’s own design tastes skew
neoclassical—he collects Napoleonic
military regalia—and he’s almost comically
romantic, citing the North American wolf as
JMM’s guiding symbol. So the brand’s many
aesthetic flourishes are as central to the
artisanal process as the Japanese craftsmen
who cut and polish the frames. Each pair
comes with a hand-numbered card that
invites you to assume the character of
the icon who inspired the design. The Enzo
(as in Ferrari) will “hide your sins from theworld”; the Windsor (as in the Duke of) is for
those determined to pave their own path.
Of course, nothing demonstrates luxury
quite like scarcity: There can’t be dozens
of Enzos at the San Vicente Bungalows. So
JMM produces as few as 50 pairs of some
models, which will run you anywhere from
$495 to $1,075. Mage didn’t set out to appeal
exclusively to the well-heeled (his famous
fans include Jeff Goldblum and LeBron
James), but after the first run, he found that
his shades wouldn’t be cheap. “We ended
up with a price,” he says. “We were like,
‘Okay, well, that’s the price of the glasses.’ ”
This season, to replace the dozens of
silhouettes that have sold out, he’s
introducing 14 new ones—and laboring
obsessively to keep them distinct and rare.
“I do the project a bit like Stanley Kubrick
did,” Mage says. “Stanley was at the service
of his movies. I really feel that I’m at the
service of my glasses.” —SAMUEL HINEEROME MAGE STARTED with
a bold idea to overthrow
banal design in the eyewear
industry: Make sunglasses
as elegant as a Brancusi
bronze, as tactile as a Noguchi stone, and
as heavy as a monster truck. That’s what
he did in 2015 when he established Jacques
Marie Mage, his line of rarefied frames that
both exaggerates and refines everything
I love about high-quality glasses.
“I have no other choice, right?” says
Mage, a French expat now living in Los
Angeles who spent two decades designing
goggles and gear for snowboarding and
motocross companies like Burton and Spy.
“We tried to do the best: the best materials,
the best packaging, the best stories.” He
started by sourcing acetate that’s several
millimeters thicker than anything used by
other brands. My favorite JMM shades,
inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s characteristic