How Cutler & Gross Mastered the Art of the Eyewear Collaboration

What makes a good collaboration?

In an environment that’s positively saturated with the “X” symbol stuffed between brands that have seemingly little in common—and whose commercial confluence often feels distinctly forced—this question has plagued more than one storied company of late.

For London-based eyewear maker Cutler & Gross, the answer lies in the pursuit of authenticity. Established by friends and opticians Graham Cutler and Tony Gross in 1969, the duo’s firm quickly exploded in popularity well beyond its humble premises at 16 Knightsbridge Green. By the 1980s, everyone from Madonna to Grace Jones and Blondie’s Debbie Harry was wearing their frames, which are hand-crafted in Domegge di Cadore, Italy, from the best raw materials. You’ll find them in flagship stores and high-end boutiques throughout the world. Lately, partnerships with the likes of the Kingsman series of films, skatewear brand Palace, jeweler The Great Frog, and watchmaker Breitling have helped spread word about the brand beyond the optical world.

“There’s probably two parts to it,” explains Cutler & Gross CEO Jack Dooley. “Authenticity is really key. If there’s not a real link, then it’s a bit tenuous. There are a lot of brands that do collaborations for purely monetary reasons. But if you take someone like Palace—Gareth, one of the founders of Palace, is actually a Cutler & Gross wearer. So when he wanted to do eyewear, it was the first thing that came to mind. With something like The Great Frog, Reino, the founder, his father used to wear Cutler & Gross. He found them going through his father’s stuff and thought, ‘Cool, I must look these guys up.’”

But mutual interest isn’t enough to yield an excellent, natural-feeling collaboration. For this, a focused sense of design that pulls from elements of both collaborators’ spheres is necessary. “We try to immerse ourselves in the collaborator’s world and their materials, their history, their audience,” continues Dooley. “We’ve made a really conscious decision to stay away from the traditional license model, so all of our collaborations or licenses are all co-branded,” he adds. “Stamping a logo or something on a pair of frames sticking it out there—I’m not sure that works anymore. It’s definitely not genuine.”

This commitment to authenticity makes the design process more difficult, more involved, and more expensive—but in the end, it yields a product that feels authentic to the identity of both brands, and this clearly resonates with buyers. When one considers that even a relatively simple Cutler & Gross acetate frame requires 260 hours of production, the extra attention to detail required of a collaborative product seems even more impressive. “Margin and cost are probably the last things we think about when designing a frame, which drives my CFO crazy,” laughs Dooley. “But we’re one of the few independent brands that owns our own factory. We select the best acetates. The temples are thicker, there’s more volume in the frame. The materials are much better because we make our own temple cores, hinges, and parts. So it’s kind of like a watch: The more of it you can make internally, the more you can say it’s your own.”

Fittingly, one of Cutler & Gross’s latest—and arguably, most interesting—collaborations is with Swiss watchmaker Breitling. CEO Georges Kern discovered Cutler & Gross when he asked an optician located across from Breitling’s offices in Geneva, Switzerland, what their top brands were. The resulting relationship proved a fruitful one—though this doesn’t mean that designing a collaborative collection was easy. “Breitling was a bit more work because they’ve got a really strong brand identity and they’re super direct in what they want, so that leads to some positive tension,” says Dooley. “We looked at Breitling’s DNA in aviation: the dials, the bezels, the knurling on the crown, the watch strap, which is like a Milanese strap that we incorporated into the hardware. We consciously didn’t go to stick “Breitling” on the outside or a big “B” or anything like that. All the branding, all the motifs are all internal, and most, if not all of them, are structural. So they’re inherent, you need them. If you even look at the hinges, they’re modeled after the clasp on the inside of the strap from the Superocean Heritage.”

Indeed, when one thinks of Breitling, one invariably imagines a pilot’s watch—the Navigator with its famed computational bezel, perhaps, or its predecessor, the Chronomat. But the focus for the two brands’ collaboration was the Superocean Heritage, a line of dive watches that brings Breitling’s tool watch expertise to the seafaring crowd. “They wanted to make sure that this was totally focused on the retro Superocean Heritage. It’s even to the point where we’ve [got] the “pine tree” from the hour hand in the frames at the temple, and it’s actually got lume in it. So if you put your frames on in the dark, you can see it. Some of this stuff has never been done before—that’s the fun thing for me with pushing both brands to do something special.”

Two frame types—the Breitling Chrono 0002 and Breitling Lémain 0001—are available directly from Cutler & Gross in different colors and editions, and each is suffused with nods to the Swiss watchmaker’s esteemed dive watch collection. (Other editions—the Biarritz 0003, Cloudbreak 0004, and Marisol 0005—are available from Breitling.) But Cutler & Gross didn’t stop at aesthetic influences. Rather, the production process was just as important to Breitling, and so Cutler & Gross adopted this importance into its own values system. “They were super passionate about sustainability,” continues Dooley. “So the acetates are made from bio-acetate, which is amazing. We’ve never really done that before. And all of the components had to be sourced so that they knew where every element came from. So even within our supply chain, it took a lot of extra work. You think you’re buying from one supplier, but who’s he buying from? So it was a great learning process for us, too.”

And while more traditional acetate does figure into the designs, it’s really lightweight titanium that takes center stage within the Breitling collection. In fact, it was the use of the metal that informed Cutler & Gross’s latest line, the Fall Knightsbridge Green Titanium Collection, which hit shelves in late September. Made in Japan, the production process is involved and time-consuming, with nearly 400 hours of work required per frame. The performance sunglass versions, which use Zeiss lenses, will be priced at roughly double many Cutler & Gross acetate models, but the lightness, strength, and precision of the materials are well worth the investment. “We focus on proportion, on balance, on the fit,” says Dooley. “It’s really the pinnacle of our product tree. It’s a different kind of product for us, but it’s really exciting. There’s that big buzzword of ‘quiet luxury,’ but that’s probably where you’d say it is because it’s about the details.”