Linda Farrow: How One Designer Turned Sunglasses Into Fashion

Long before sunglasses were treated as a runway accessory, they were mostly seen as a functional, faintly clinical object — something a doctor prescribed, not something a designer imagined. Linda Farrow was one of the first people to change that. Here's the story of how a London label built in 1970 became one of the most distinctive names in luxury eyewear.

London, 1970: eyewear as fashion, not function

Linda Farrow founded her eponymous eyewear label in London in 1970, at a moment when sunglasses were rarely thought of as fashion at all. Farrow, a fashion designer herself before turning to eyewear, saw an opportunity that few others had spotted: treating sunglasses the same way a couture house treated clothing — as an object of shape, art, and personality, not just UV protection.

She threw herself into experimentation, pioneering bold, avant-garde shapes that hadn't existed in eyewear before. Her designs found their way onto some of the era's most recognizable faces, including Yoko Ono, and she began collaborating directly with fashion houses like Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Pucci, and Sonia Rykiel — brands who wanted eyewear that matched the ambition of their runway shows. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Linda Farrow's name became closely tied to the idea that sunglasses could be genuinely high fashion.

A quiet exit in the 1980s

In the mid-1980s, Farrow stepped back from the label to focus on her family, and the brand went dormant. For roughly two decades, Linda Farrow existed only as a memory in fashion circles and a collection of archived designs sitting largely out of view.

An accidental discovery brings the brand back: 2003

The brand's second act began almost by chance. In 2003, Linda Farrow's son, Simon Jablon, then 24 years old, came across a trove of his mother's original sunglasses sitting in the family's London warehouse — thousands of pairs from the archive, untouched since the label had gone quiet. Rather than let the discovery sit, Jablon relaunched the label under the name Linda Farrow Vintage, selling the rediscovered archive pieces.

The response caught everyone off guard. The vintage relaunch quickly picked up stockists at influential department stores like Browns and Harvey Nichols, and demand for the archival designs made it clear there was a real appetite for the brand's return. Encouraged by that reception, Jablon didn't stop at reselling the archive — he began designing new Linda Farrow eyewear himself, built in the same spirit of boundary-pushing design his mother had established decades earlier.

Building a modern luxury label

Once relaunched under the original Linda Farrow name, the brand quickly leaned back into what had made it distinctive the first time around: collaboration. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Linda Farrow partnered with a wide range of acclaimed designers and labels — including The Row, Alexander Wang, Yohji Yamamoto, Jeremy Scott, Raf Simons, Paco Rabanne, Oscar de la Renta, Dries Van Noten, and 3.1 Phillip Lim, among many others — pairing its eyewear expertise with each designer's individual point of view. The brand also picked up its first Vogue cover in this period, cementing its return to the fashion mainstream.

Today, Linda Farrow's frames are produced in Japan using materials like titanium and acetate, reflecting a continued emphasis on craftsmanship over mass production. The brand has grown to include over 30 standalone stores and concessions along with roughly 500 wholesale stockists worldwide, while staying privately owned by the Farrow-Jablon family — a rarity in an eyewear industry increasingly dominated by a handful of massive conglomerates. Its designs have been worn by figures like Rihanna, Beyoncé, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, and Lady Gaga, keeping the brand firmly in the same cultural spotlight Linda Farrow herself first found in the 1970s.

The takeaway

Linda Farrow's history is really a story in two acts: a 1970s pioneer who insisted sunglasses deserved the same design ambition as couture clothing, and a 21st-century revival built almost by accident, when a son found his mother's archive and recognized what the world had been missing. Fifty-plus years later, the throughline hasn't changed — eyewear treated not as a medical accessory, but as fashion in its own right.