Gai Gherardi, an optician of Los Angeles who attracted a famous clientele with a partner by pioneering that donkey frames did not have to be boring, but rather fashion statements of individuality, died in her house in Hollywood on 16 March. She was 78.
Her sister, Heather Gherardi, said the cause was bile ducts that she heard she had last month.
“Glass pay spontaneity,” Mrs. Gherardi told New York Times magazine in 1993. “They offer the possibility of a multitude of changes in your persona; they are a great accessory, a great prop.”
“Contacts are rigid. They are not fun,” she added. “Maybe you see it better, but you can’t look better.”
A Gregarious personality who dressed in daring colors, Mrs. Gherardi opened her store, La EyeworksOn Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979 with her boyfriend and colleague optician Barbara McReynolds. Mrs. Gherardi led the design of fashionable frames with a limited edition that are known for their sharp corners, unusual shapes and striking shades and marketed with playful names, such as Rooster, Whirly Bird and MX. Busy. In 1993 the store started using lasers to engrave metal frames with patterns, such as maps of South California and the United States.
“The frames are both an expression of pure wealth and a secret code word between like -minded individuals,” Dave Schilling wrote In 2022 in Image, in the Los Angeles Times’s Style Magazine, “indicates that you too have a sense of humor about yourself, that you too are different.”
The early popularity of the store among artists, actors, architects and the LGBTQ community has been improved by a Print advertising campaignStill going in trendy magazines, which has shown more than 200 black and white portraits of celebrities and other celebrities who carried glasses from La Eyeworks. Photographed by Greg Gorman, they recorded Chaka Khan, Rupaul, David Hockney, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Paul Reubens, famous for his character Pee-Weman Herman.
The slogan of the campaign: “A face is like a work of art. It deserves a great framework.”
Mr. Gorman said that Andy Warhol had asked to be in the campaign, which was launched in the interview magazine of Mr. Warhol and expanded to other hip, fashion -conscious magazines such as paper and details.
“Part of the challenge was to find frames that supplemented the person’s face,” Mr. Gorman said in an interview. “Sometimes Gai came by with bizarre glasses, and we would always find a way to catapult them on the faces of people.”
The store customers include Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Billy Idol and Carrie Fisher. Elton John, who is known for his shameful glasses, also shoped in the store, where a design was made for him in an adapted color.
After the death of Mrs. Gherardi, The Fashion Design Council described her as a “crucial figure in the glasses industry.” In 2014, she helped the Council to form a subgroup of glasses designers and was part of a philanthropic company that donated more than $ 100,000 to LGBTQ causes.
Blake Kuwehara, a spectacle designer That collaborated with Mrs. Gherardi and three others on sunglasses with a rainbow theme for Pride Month in 2023, said in a statement that she “brought a path for independent glasses designers,” added: “She was big, merciful and gave every turn.”
Gai Travelle Gherardi was born on July 8, 1946 in Los Angeles and grew at about an hour to the south in Huntington Beach. Her mother, Millicent (Selby) Gherardi, had a fashion store for women. Her father, Fabio Frank Gherardi, built homes and led a band he called Fabio’s Big Band USA.
Gai surfed Beach on Huntington and got her first job there, in a night club called The Golden Bear, where she remembered that she saw Lenny Bruce perform. She met Mrs. MCreynolds at Huntington High School and they became good friends. When Mrs. McReynolds got a job in 1965 at an optician shop in Newport Beach, she helped Mrs. Gherardi there.
Mrs. Gherardi described glasses for her customers as an almost mystical experience.
“I can’t explain it,” she said in an interview in 2017 with Art Matters Foundation, of which she was a board member. “You put glasses on someone, you touch their heads and you look into their eyes.” She added: “Eyen and glasses and glasses all started to become this way of communicating.”
But, she said, frame design in her early days in glasses was at his best prosaic.
“People then wore Mack trucks on their faces” De Los Angeles Times told in 2002. “The choice was usually between butterfly shapes in pink with rhinestones and basic models in black or turtle scale.”
During the war in Vietnam, they and Mrs. McReynolds held meetings of drawing substitutes and helped young men to avoid military service by offering them glasses with recipes that gave them what they called ‘insane’ vision.
After working together in Newport Beach, Mrs. Gherardi held jobs at other optical stores and Mrs. McReynolds worked for a lens company. Yet they dreamed of opening their own store one day; Both were certified opticians.
In 1979 they found a place for La Eyeworks on Melrose Avenue, and Mrs. Gherardi’s father built the store for them.
Some of the first designs of the store came from painting, in different colors, a wealth of neutral colored frames from the 1950s. “Just put a color on them,” Mrs. Gherardi told Art Matters, “and put them on a beautiful woman who would never wear something like that; suddenly,” my god, “you just look at it as a design.”
Heather Gherardi, who is also an optician and who worked with her sister for 27 years, said in an interview: “She would say:” Why be boring if you can have fun? “”
La Eyeworks expanded to three stores, but a second store in Los Angeles closed after 2022 in 2022, and another, in Costa Mesa, who succeeded Heather Gherardi, was closed after 21 years, closed in 2009.
With an intake of artists who become customers, Mrs. Gherardi and Mrs. McReynold’s monthly art shows in La Eyeworks began to keep. And in 2009 the two women began to hire artists-including Catherine Opie, Alison Saar, Barbara Kruger and Gabriela Ruiz-from ordinary lens-cleaning cloths to convert into microfiber cloths.
In addition to her sister, Mrs. Gherardi is survived by her life partner, Rhonda Saboff, and her half -sisters, Michelle and Rene Gherardi. Mrs. McReynolds retired a few years ago.
In 1984 Mrs. Gherardi was in the studio of Mr. Gorman in Los Angeles Then Divine, the Drag Queen and Muze from the filmmaker John Waters, arrived for a photo shoot for the La Eyeworks campaign. She remembered that she was watching Divine, whose birth name Harris Glenn Milstead was, arrived in a suit, without makeup or a wig. The rise of Divine three hours later, she said: “In this fantastic pink fortress dress” brought her to tears.
“It was the most transforming moment,” she told Image Magazine. “And part of it was this overwhelming feeling of how everyone negotiates and navigates for beauty.”
