The Bite Magazine - Spring/Summer 2020 - Issue 27

bite glasses F arrow F L L inda Taking inspiration from the 1970s, the decade the brand was first founded, Linda Farrow presents its SS20 collection and also celebrates its 50th Anniversary . Jada Brookes looks at the psychedelic era themed collection. I n 1970, when the First Earth Day was celebrated, The Beatles broke up, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC against the Vietnam War, Edward Heath and the Conservative party won the British gen- eral elections, and the first jumbo jet went into service, the Linda Farrow brand of luxury eye- wear was established. As an original designer herself, Linda Farrow was one of the first to treat sunglasses as fashion, producing collection after collection, her finger always on the pulse of the times. In 1983, the brand went into a twenty-year hiatus until it was revived by the designer’s son Simon Jablon in 2003, upon recovering a collection of his mother’s original designs at the age of 24. He relaunched the brand as Linda Farrow Vintage, with the original archive quickly gaining stock- ists at leading department stores such as Browns and Harvey Nichols. An unprecedented demand for the archive led him to revive the brand fully as well as create his own Linda Farrow eyewear. Taking his mother’s visionary further, Simon quickly cemented several collaborations includ- ing Elley Kishimoto in 2004, Jeremy Scott in 2006, and Dries Van Noten and Raf Simons in 2008. Harvey Nichols started stocking the re- vived brand’s designs in 2005 and the following year, Linda Farrow sunglasses first appeared on the cover of Vogue . Four years later, a collabora- tion with Alexander Wang saw one of their de- signs on the cover of Vogue . The first Hong Kong boutique opened in 2009, followed by the London flagship in 2013. That same year saw an 18 karat jewellery collection launched, while a year later in 2014, Linda Far- row collaborated with 3.1 Philip Lim, whose design was worn by Rihanna in Lui magazine. Model Irina Shayk starred in the brand’s SS15 campaign, and in 2016, model Chanel Iman ap-