AnOther Loves: Shades for the Morning After

From Tom Ford’s earliest days to Haider Ackermann’s seductive reinvention of the house, sunglasses have always been part of the uniform. These styles offer two new ways to hide

“You know, one always looks better in photographs with sunglasses on,” Tom Ford said as a camera approached him at Haider Ackermann’s debut for his namesake house. He promptly put on a pair. Sunglasses, after all, have been part of the label almost from the beginning: when Ford founded it in 2005, eyewear was among its earliest propositions, arriving two years before his menswear. It is fertile territory for Ackermann, whose Tom Ford is increasingly becoming a conversation with Mr Ford rather than a cosplay. These two styles pictured above offer different ways to disappear. The Bronson is a hefty acetate pilot with pink-tinted lenses; the Brady, rather more dramatically, is a gold metal wraparound with a single smoke-mirror lens stretched across the face. Both carry the little metal T, one of the house’s earliest and most enduring signatures, but beyond that, their shapes have history of their own. The pilot began as practical equipment in the 1930s, developed to protect aviators’ eyes from glare at altitude, before Hollywood helped turn them into something much cooler. The Brady belongs to an exhibitionist branch of this shady family tree: shield sunglasses appeared in the futuristic fashions of Courrèges, Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent in the late 1960s, then returned with vengeance around the turn of the millennium. Before his debut, Ackermann described Ford as the night and himself as “more the morning after” – in that case, keeping these sunglasses on feels commonsensical.

The Brady and Bronson sunglasses by Tom Ford are available to buy now