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PARIS — What do Aristotle Onassis, Yves Saint Laurent and Jacques Chirac have in common? Wealth? Power? Influence? No, their large glasses, arguably the life and soul of their faces.
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Once a medical necessity, eyewear has evolved since the 1950s into an image and fashion statement.
“These are not mere accessories — they sit in the middle of your face, they allow you to see and to be seen,” said Steven Bonnet, a frame designer who, with his brother, Franck, and father, Christian, runs the made-to-measure glasses boutique Maison Bonnet in Paris.
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They are following a family tradition started by Christian’s grandfather, Alfred Bonnet, in the 1930s in Morez, a town in the French Jura region that has been a center of eyewear making since the 19th century. In fact, it was near Morez in 1796 that the first pair of eyeglasses was made by Pierre-Hyacinthe Caseaux, an inventive nail maker who wrapped metal wire around polished pieces of glass.
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Near-sightedness was no longer the curse it had been for centuries.
Maison Bonnet has taken its trade to heart for four generations. In addition to Onassis, Saint Laurent and Chirac, the house’s array of legendary customers across the decades has included such luminaries as Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Jacqueline Kennedy and Fran?ois Mitterrand.
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In the past, Christian Bonnet would visit clients in their homes to evaluate their lifestyle and tastes, observing their interiors before suggesting an appropriate eyeglass frame. This was in keeping with the traditional aristocratic shopping method, when tailors and lace makers paid such visits to clients’ homes.
Today, things have changed: Customers now flock to Maison Bonnet’s first boutique, which was opened in 2009 under the Palais Royal arcades in central Paris.
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No over-the-counter, 24-hour glasses-and-frame service here. The purchase of each pair of glasses is the result of a three-month operation, involving 20 hours of hand labor, and a process that includes 10 stages, 12 fittings, interviews, personality assessments and face measurements. With only six employees — including the three Bonnets — the house produces 500 pairs of glasses a year in its Paris workshop.
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Customers are interviewed individually over coffee by Franck or Steven Bonnet in the private apartments above the shop. They discuss their hobbies, favorite rock bands and cars, and most of all how they feel about themselves and the image they would like to project.
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“We conduct an interview based on seven or eight questions to understand what exactly they are seeking,” Franck Bonnet said. “We make a point of asking them what they like and dislike about their faces, so that we can get an idea of how the glasses can correct what they consider flaws.”
“Glasses are like makeup,” he added, “for instance, women tend to complain about the lower lid and the skin just below that , so we make sure to design glasses that hide rather than frame that particular part of their face.”
discount louboutin pumpsEyeglasses, it seems, can be anything to anybody: They can glorify a personality, emphasize one’s best features, bring untold glamour to the wearer. As a result, the house has often received chocolates from grateful customers and emotional thank-you notes, the Bonnet brothers said.
Yet frames are not the whole story. Maison Bonnet prides itself on medical accomplishment, as well. Visual acuity can be achieved only through the most precise fitting. This requires meticulous measuring of the various angles of the nose and a number of other strategic details that will condition the fit of the spectacles. A special device tracks how the eyes follow a moving light, to detect how the head moves and how much the pupil is working. Each customer is unique and requires special consideration.
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Franck Bonnet noted that while the industry had made “enormous progress in the actual technology of the lenses,” the overall quality of glasses in general was declining.
But not at the exclusive Maison Bonnet, which claims to be the only remaining maker of tortoiseshell frames.
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And Maison Bonnet’s luxury comes at a price. Worn by people such as the shoe designer Christian Louboutin and the actress Valérie Lemercier, Bonnet glasses can cost from €650, or about $890, for acetate to €1,000 for buffalo horn and from €3,000 to €20,000 for tortoiseshell, the house speciality.
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In the 1950s, Maison Bonnet produced frames made of nothing else.
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