A BOLD VISION FOR EYEWEAR
His frame-within-a-frame design puts Blake Kuwahara in the sights of cutting-edge clients
The sparkling wine and Pellegrino were flowing at the Focal Point optical boutique in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood in June when owner David Salk hosted a trunk show of cutting-edge Los Angeles eyewear designer Blake Kuwahara’s fourth collection since launching his eponymous line in 2014. Kuwahara’s signature frame-within-a frame designs, worn by Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson and Charlize Theron, retail for $600 to $675.
Raised in Monterey Park (Los Angeles County), Kurahawa got his undergraduate degree at UCLA and his doctorate of optometry down the street at UC Berkeley. He left his busy private practice in Manhattan Beach after realizing he preferred dealing with customers in the office’s boutique to seeing patients in the examining room.
He answered a classified ad in the Los Angeles Times for a fashion forecaster at Liz Claiborne Optics, and the owner ended up offering him the job of creative director. “He said, ‘You have a sense of style, color and proportion, and I can’t teach people that,’ ” recalled the warm and lithe Kuwahara, sporting black shorts and T-shirt accented by chunky jewelry and fashion hightops with laces up the back.
Style spoke with him a few hours before he headed to his 30th optometry-school class reunion.
Q: How does it feel being back in Berkeley? A: It’s like a homecoming for sure. I lived only a couple of blocks from here, and Focal Point was here then. When I had my first proprietary collection (with Kata Eyewear in 1992), David was one of the first to support my line. And with my collection under my own name, he was literally the first.
Q: Did you have design training in your background?
I’ve always had two paths. In school, my academic path was always in the sciences. I’m also fourth-generation Asian American, and all Asian parents want their kids to be doctors, so that was almost preordained in a way. But at the same time, I always enjoyed things that were more creative. My mom’s an artist, my grandmother’s an artist. At UCLA, I got my undergraduate degree in psychobiology, and I was also art director for the yearbook. I did an internship with an interior designer during my last year and was offered a position after I graduated. But I was accepted into optometry school at Berkeley. So I had to make a career choice. I went to my parents and asked their advice, and they provided sound wisdom, which was to go to optometry school, because you can always fall back on interior design if you find that’s really your passion. And I’m glad I did, because I wouldn’t be doing what I do now unless I had taken that career path.
Q: How did you come up with your frame-within-aframe design? A: The concept of the collection is taking two different eye shapes and laminating them together. The inspiration came from friends of mine who straddle both business and creative fields — architects, photographers, graphic designers, people in the fashion industry. It was a way to integrate two different aesthetics into one frame. The inside silhouettes are somewhat classical and easy to wear, and the outside silhouettes give the frame its dimension and edge. And because the outside silhouette is crystal, from far away you don’t really see it. As you get closer, you see the totality of the frame and it takes on a whole different personality. Q: You’ve said architecture has been an inspiration. How so? A: Frames are like mini-architecture in a way — we’re just working on a smaller landscape. Architects are my design heroes. All the frames in my collection are named after architects. Q: Do you have a muse? A: My grandmother. She’s going to be 101 this year. She’s amazing. She’s an artist and was also a jewelry designer and a furniture designer. She was always the Auntie Mame kind of grandmother. We call her Kachan, which in Japanese means mother, not grandmother, because she always felt she was too young to be called grandmother. Instead of having a Christmas tree, she found a tumbleweed and put lights on it. She instilled in me how important aesthetics are, and that it’s really about your perspective. She actually wears my frame, at 101 — it’s crazy.