Rimowa Is Getting Serious About What’s on Your Face (EXCLUSIVE)

The new sunglass collaboration from the  eyewear brand Mykita and the luxury German luggage brand Rimowa is all about restraint. “Both brands have a strong visual identity, but neither relies on decoration to make a statement,” says Mykita creative director Moritz Kreuger. “The character comes from the design itself.”

That character comes alive in this collaboration that’s meant to be more than a one-off.  “Mykita x Rimowa was conceived as a long-term design partnership rather than a series of seasonal releases,” says Kreuger. “What’s interesting is the collective knowledge and resources we bring together — two companies with their own manufacturing infrastructure, engineering expertise and a deep understanding of materials.” 

The two new styles dropped today that exemplify this level of craft, the MR007 and MR008. The former is more traditional, while the latter takes a more artistic approach to sunglasses. “MR007 is a perfectly round shape — one of the most recognizable archetypes in eyewear,” says Kreuger.

And, in the frame, a delicate combination of Mykita’s lightweight stainless steel, and Rimowa’s anodized aluminum rings. MR008, however, is more experimental leaning, a refinement on the original Mykita visor wraparound shield frame. The difference between the MR007 and MR008 reflects two modes of designing glasses, one “a nod to eyewear history,” the other “decidedly futuristic,” according to Kreuger.

Each of these design concepts reflects the technical foundations behind Mykita x Rimowa, a creative partnership engineered to independently shift along with the demands of the design world. These foundations boil down to two families of eyewear: Heritage, a collection of pieces intended to become instant classics, and Visor, an initiative driven mainly by experimentation, be it in lightweight construction or new, technical ways to design eyewear. 

Today’s drop is subtle in all the right ways to preserve impact, which is just what’s to be expected from a collaboration between Mykita and Rimowa. Again, we return to this idea of restraint — a word that, in the context of the MR007 and MR008, is less synonymous with holding back than it is representative of what’s to come. Which, like the future, cannot be predicted, though it can be projected in a pair of sunglasses.

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