Dior Eyewear: The House That Turned Sunglasses Into High Fashion

Long before most fashion houses thought to put their name on a pair of sunglasses, Christian Dior had already done it — and in doing so, arguably invented the entire category of designer eyewear as we understand it today.

The New Look that changed fashion: 1947

Christian Dior launched his first haute couture collection on February 12, 1947, at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, at the age of 42. Before striking out on his own, Dior had worked as a designer for the House of Lucien Lelong, but it was his own debut collection — later dubbed the "New Look" by Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow — that made his name. The collection, which Dior himself called "Corolle," represented a dramatic departure from the austere, wartime-influenced fashion that had dominated the previous years: cinched waists and full skirts that Snow described as opening "like the corolla of a flower." Neiman Marcus awarded him the Fashion Oscar almost immediately, and the fashion press was unanimous in recognizing that Dior had ushered in something genuinely new.

Christian Dior died in Montecatini, Italy, on October 24, 1957. Before his passing, he had already made clear that his assistant since 1955, a young designer named Yves Saint Laurent, should take over as Creative Director — setting the house on a path of continual reinvention that has now spanned multiple generations of designers.

An early, exclusive foray into eyewear

Dior's eyewear story actually begins earlier than most accounts suggest. In the 1950s, Christian Dior granted an eyewear license to New York optician Monroe Levoy, founder of the company Tura, which produced the earliest Dior eyewear — haute couture glasses decorated with elaborate jewelry-style applications, made exclusively for women and available only to a very select group of buyers.

The partnership that built modern Dior eyewear: 1966–1969

The real transformation came in 1966, when Dior entered into licensing negotiations with Austrian eyewear manufacturer Wilhelm Anger — the same industry figure behind Carrera and Viennaline. Dior became the first major fashion house to license its name for a dedicated eyewear brand, a move that would go on to shape how virtually every other fashion label approached eyewear in the decades that followed. The first Dior sunglasses under this new partnership were released in 1969, made of acetate in a large, round silhouette that established the visual foundation for Dior eyewear for years to come.

Optyl: the material that changed everything

Anger's greatest technical contribution to Dior eyewear was Optyl, a lightweight, heat-hardened plastic he developed and patented — roughly 20% lighter than standard acetate, hypoallergenic, heat-resistant, and remarkably resistant to discoloration over time. Optyl gave Dior's designers a level of creative freedom that simply hadn't existed before: wide, original silhouettes; entirely new colorways; and delicate gradient effects in transparent browns, greens, and greys that remain closely associated with the brand's elegant, sophisticated aesthetic to this day. Anger coined the slogan "Dress your face" for the brand — a fitting summary of Dior's broader ambition to treat eyewear less as a functional necessity and more as a genuine fashion statement, on par with the house's jewelry line.

Decades of dominance

By the mid-1970s, Dior's eyewear collection had come to dominate the optical industry, continuously expanding through the 1990s. The Monsieur series of the 1980s became the brand's most successful men's eyewear line, offering elegant designer glasses that could be glazed as either sunglasses or prescription eyewear — including classic aviators, round panto shapes, and timeless square silhouettes in metal or Optyl. In 1996, the license for producing Dior eyewear passed to the Safilo Group, which continued the collection through 2020.

A new era: Thélios

Dior eyewear is now produced through Thélios, a joint venture formed in 2018 between LVMH (which holds a 51% stake) and the storied Italian eyewear manufacturer Marcolin. Since its formation, Thélios has grown to produce eyewear for a wide roster of LVMH-affiliated maisons, including Celine, Loewe, Kenzo, Fendi, Berluti, and Fenty, alongside Dior. Under creative direction that has included figures like Maria Grazia Chiuri — the first woman to lead the house, known for infusing a distinctly feminist perspective into Dior's collections — and Kim Jones for menswear, Dior eyewear has continued to expand into new territory, including sport-inflected capsule collections like DiorAlps.

A design language rooted in the house's icons

Modern Dior eyewear consistently draws on the maison's broader design codes: the quilted "cannage" pattern that also appears on Dior's iconic handbags, the Rose des Vents beaded jewelry motif reinterpreted in ultra-thin metalwork, and the house's signature "CD" and "Christian Dior Paris" branding rendered across temples in varying degrees of subtlety. Recent collections have spanned everything from transparent acetate frames with crystal-embellished temples to lens-in-lens nylon mask constructions and the elaborate CD Diamond line, where frames are laser-engraved and hand-assembled to reflect what the house describes as its fundamental savoir-faire.