I’ve got a bit of an obsession with sunglasses and it all stems from this Carl Zeiss pair that my Dad bought on Jermyn Street, London, in 1960 before being posted to Jamaica with the British Army (tough posting!) The thick stainless steel frames and brown solid optical glass make them very heavy compared to today’s plastic frames and lenses, but they’re very comfortable to wear, and the brown lenses give everything a fantastic warmth.
By the late 80’s he’d moved on to a pair of Porsche Carreras, and I took to coveting and occasionally borrowing the Zeiss rather than wearing my Wayfarers, partly because they were unlike anything anyone else had, but mainly because they looked like the pair Hunter Thompson was wearing on the cover of The Great Shark Hunt.
When I moved to the USA to go to college in the early 90s he gave them to me and I wore them solidly for a couple of years before they were cast aside for a pair of hideous Ray-Ban wraparounds (the horror) but they’ll always remain the most treasured pair in my possession. The stories they could tell, the places and trips they’ve been on. And sunglasses are always there for the good times in life: holidays, road trips, beaches, they’re never there for rainy days or meetings (unless you’re Italian.)
In Heritage we ask folks we admire to share their most prized possession.
