During a lift ride up Stowe mountain earlier this year, I sat across from a girl whose helmet dazzled me with tiny, shiny neon purple stones. As my companions questioned the girl’s do-it-yourself undertaking, I remembered my interview with eyewear designer Kerin Rose, who creates show-stopping avant-garde styles that have graced the wardrobes of stars like Katy Perry and Rihanna. “I promise you,” she said, “even the most unaffected person is attracted to shiny things.”
Rose’s eyewear brand, A-morir, is produced with an embellishment technique called strassing, which involves gluing countless amounts of stones and other materials to sunglass bases. Since the age of 16, Karen has been strassing everyday objects, including the old school flip phone she bedazzled and still holds onto as a token of her past. While working at Patricia Field, she began ornamenting sunglass bases she bought for under $10 a pair on Canal Street. Designed for her personal use, the sunglasses’ popularity with Field’s customers inspired the buyers to carry Kerin’s shades, selling out of the first assortment within weeks. It wasn’t long before her hobby became a full-time career as a high-end eyewear designer.
“I’ve always loved fashion, but I never wanted to work in fashion. I’m an artist first and foremost,” Rose told me. “There’s a phrase they use in the movie industry, ‘One for the reel, one for the meal,’ meaning one project will pay you and one will nourish you creatively and artistically. To appeal to the masses, I include a handful of less elaborate styles in my collections, but what I really enjoy are the embellishments. With every collection, it’s a war against myself. What can I do that I haven’t done before? First it was a shield, then spikes, then a shield with spikes and studs, then acrylic tar and custom-cut lucite extensions…It gets better every time.”
Uninterested in working with a larger factory where the minimums are high and the quality is hard to control, Rose chose to produce her frames in a small factory on the southern coast of Turkey. During the beginning phases of a collection, she travels to the factory, where she meets with the small handful of artisans who produce her eyewear to pick out hinges, lenses, and other materials.
Rose spends the bulk of her time in the acetate room. Acetate is pressed cotton that becomes the plastic-looking material of which her frames are composed. Rose spends hours searching through hundreds of huge, unpolished sheets of acetate to figure out which colors and patterns she wants to use for her collection.
It’s only once she receives the final frames from the factory that the creative process really begins. Much of her inspiration seems to come from materials she is lacking. She’s continuously forced to think outside the box, creating all sorts of sunglasses with perfectly bizarre textiles, fabrics, and other elements from chains to fur to tassels to the tops of cracked beer cans.
“As I am physically setting crystals and other materials, I’m wondering if it’s going to work,” she said, offering me a window into her design process. “At this point, it’s like getting dressed in the morning and putting together an ensemble from shirt to bottoms to shoes, etc. If you have an eye for it, you can dress yourself in your head and it comes out looking really cool when it’s altogether. It’s the same thing with my designs.”
Strassing is still her favorite thing about the design and manufacturing process. Nothing makes her happier than witnessing Lady Gaga on stage wearing a pair of shoes she personally embellished with more than 8,000 stones. The 16-year-old in her is happy. The artist in her is happy. The grown-up in her is happy. Thinking about those shoes makes her happy. Her secret is that she stayed open to the happiness we all feel when we see something shiny.
Portrait credit: Sophy Holland
Photo credit: Lexi Cross