Gai Gherardi, a Los Angeles optician who with a companion attracted a star clientele by pioneering the notion that eyeglass frames didn’t must be uninteresting however fairly could possibly be style statements of individuality, died on March 16 at her house in Hollywood. She was 78.
Her sister, Heather Gherardi, mentioned the trigger was bile duct most cancers, which she discovered she had final month.
“Glasses afford spontaneity,” Ms. Gherardi instructed The New York Occasions Journal in 1993. “They provide the potential for a mess of modifications in your persona; they’re an awesome accent, an awesome prop.”
“Contacts are inflexible. They’re no enjoyable,” she added. “You might even see higher in them, however you possibly can’t look higher in them.”
A gregarious character who wearing daring colours, Ms. Gherardi opened her store, L.A. Eyeworks, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979 together with her buddy and fellow optician Barbara McReynolds. Ms. Gherardi led the design of modern, limited-edition frames which might be recognized for his or her sharp angles, uncommon shapes and placing hues and marketed with playful names, like Rooster, Whirly Hen and Mx. Busy. In 1993, the store started utilizing lasers to engrave steel frames with patterns, like maps of Southern California and america.
“The frames are each an expression of pure opulence and a secret code phrase between like-minded people,” Dave Schilling wrote in 2022 in Picture, The Los Angeles Occasions’s type journal, “signaling that you just took have a humorousness about your self, that you just too are completely different.”
The early recognition of the shop amongst artists, actors, architects and the L.G.B.T.Q. neighborhood has been enhanced for the reason that early Nineteen Eighties by a print promoting marketing campaign, nonetheless ongoing in stylish magazines, that has featured greater than 200 black-and-white portraits of celebrities and different luminaries carrying glasses from L.A. Eyeworks. Photographed by Greg Gorman, they’ve included Chaka Khan, RuPaul, David Hockney, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Paul Reubens, well-known for his character Pee-wee Herman.
The marketing campaign’s slogan: “A face is sort of a murals. It deserves an awesome body.”
Mr. Gorman mentioned that Andy Warhol had requested to be within the marketing campaign, which was launched in Mr. Warhol’s Interview journal and expanded into different hip, fashion-conscious magazines like Paper and Particulars.
“A part of the problem was to search out frames that complemented the particular person’s face,” Mr. Gorman mentioned in an interview. “Typically Gai would come over with outlandish glasses, and we’d all the time discover a strategy to catapult them onto individuals’s faces.”
The store’s prospects have included Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Billy Idol and Carrie Fisher. Elton John, who is thought for his outrageous eyewear, additionally shopped on the retailer, the place one design was made for him in a customized colour.
After Ms. Gherardi’s demise, the Council of Vogue Designers described her as a “pivotal determine within the eyewear business.” She helped the council kind a subgroup of eyewear designers in 2014 and was a part of a philanthropic enterprise that has donated greater than $100,000 to L.G.B.T.Q. causes.
Blake Kuwehara, an eyewear designer who collaborated with Ms. Gherardi and three others on rainbow-themed sun shades for Delight Month in 2023, mentioned in a press release that she had “blazed a path for impartial eyewear designers,” including, “She was grand, gracious, and giving at each flip.”
Gai Travelle Gherardi was born on July 8, 1946, in Los Angeles and grew up about an hour south in Huntington Seaside. Her mom, Millicent (Selby) Gherardi, owned a girls’s style retailer. Her father, Fabio Frank Gherardi, constructed residential housing and led a band he referred to as Fabio’s Large Band USA.
Gai surfed at Huntington Seaside and bought her first job there, at a nightclub referred to as the Golden Bear, the place she recalled seeing Lenny Bruce carry out. She met Ms. McReynolds at Huntington Excessive Faculty, and so they grew to become shut associates. When Ms. McReynolds bought a job at an optician’s store in Newport Seaside in 1965, she helped Ms. Gherardi get employed there, too.
Ms. Gherardi described offering eyeglasses for her prospects as an virtually mystical expertise.
“I can’t clarify it,” she mentioned in a 2017 interview with Artwork Issues Basis, of which she was a board member. “You place glasses on somebody, you contact their head, and also you look of their eyes.” She added, “Eyes and eyewear and glasses all began to change into this manner of speaking.”
However, she mentioned, body design in her early days in eyewear was prosaic at greatest.
“Individuals have been carrying Mack vans on their faces again then,” she instructed The Los Angeles Occasions in 2002. “The selection was largely between butterfly shapes in pink with rhinestones and primary fashions in black or tortoise shell.”
Through the Vietnam Warfare, she and Ms. McReynolds held conferences of draft resisters and helped younger males keep away from navy service by offering them with glasses with prescriptions that gave them what she referred to as “wonky” imaginative and prescient.
After working collectively in Newport Seaside, Ms. Gherardi took jobs at different optical retailers and Ms. McReynolds labored for a lens firm. Nonetheless, they dreamed of opening their very own retailer at some point; each have been licensed opticians.
In 1979, they discovered a spot for L.A. Eyeworks on Melrose Avenue, and Ms. Gherardi’s father constructed the shop for them.
Among the store’s first designs got here from dyeing, in varied colours, a trove of Fifties-era neutral-colored frames. “Simply placing a colour on them,” Ms. Gherardi instructed Artwork Issues, “and placing them on a stupendous girl who would by no means put on one thing like that; impulsively, ‘Oh, my God,’ you’re simply this as design.”
Heather Gherardi, who can be an optician and who labored together with her sister for 27 years, mentioned in an interview, “She would say, ‘Why be boring when you possibly can have enjoyable?’”
L.A. Eyeworks expanded to 3 shops, however a second store in Los Angeles closed in 2022 after 20 years, and one other, in Costa Mesa, which Heather Gherardi managed, closed in 2009 after 21 years.
With an inflow of artists changing into prospects, Ms. Gherardi and Ms. McReynolds started holding month-to-month artwork reveals at L.A. Eyeworks. And in 2009, the 2 girls started to rent artists — together with Catherine Opie, Alison Saar, Barbara Kruger and Gabriela Ruiz — to show abnormal lens-cleaning cloths into microfiber items of artwork.
Along with her sister, Ms. Gherardi is survived by her life companion, Rhonda Saboff, and her half sisters, Michelle and Rene Gherardi. Ms. McReynolds retired from the enterprise some years in the past.
In 1984, Ms. Gherardi was at Mr. Gorman’s studio in Los Angeles when Divine, the drag queen and muse of the filmmaker John Waters, arrived for a photograph shoot for the L.A. Eyeworks marketing campaign. She recalled watching Divine, whose beginning identify was Harris Glenn Milstead, arrive in a swimsuit, with none make-up or a wig. Divine’s emergence three hours later, she mentioned, “on this incredible pink sequined gown,” moved her to tears.
“It was probably the most transformative second,” she instructed Picture journal. “And a part of it was this overwhelming feeling of how everybody negotiates and navigates to magnificence.”
