Night Shades: Oliver Goldsmith's Exclusive Lord Frames are back

Let’s get this straight from the onset. These are not sunglasses for the evening. They are a pair of Oliver Goldsmith Lord frames, based on the very same model created for Michael Caine in 1961, fitted with a pair of graduated and smoked transitional lenses that are the perfect shade to be worn indoors and into the nocturnal underworld of smoky boites, dissolute bars and even intimate candlelit dinners. The lenses have been hand-selected by us along with Claire Goldsmith, current owner and granddaughter of Oliver Goldsmith, to be precisely the perfect shade to shield your eyes from prying glances, immediately creating a sense of psychological separation between yourself and the other denizens orbiting your personal universe. With these glasses on, it’s you that makes the choice whether to let them engage with you or keep them perpetually at bay. And they are in every way crafted in homage to two perennially louche but larger than life Rakes, who championed the use of their “night shades” to their every advantage. Diminutive but so positively saturnine that he could have been cast from the same bronze as Cronus himself, Aristotle Onassis was equally known for his capacity for outrage, his lifetime game of cosmic one-upmanship against fellow Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos, and a certain dégagé élan personified by plunging lapelled 6 x 1 double-breasted suits and his tinted glasses worn throughout his innumerable connubial dalliances. And these glasses - thick framed with a smoked-out lens; just the right shade to instill uncertainty in his rivals as to whether he was always watching them - also endowed him with mystery and an effortless sense of radiant magnetism. Conversely, it was Jack Nicholson who demonstrated that the right eyewear always created the perfect sense of separation from the public’s prying eyes no matter how outrageous his antics at seminal Parisian locales like Regines or Les Bains Douche. When asked the rationale for his perpetually shielded eyes Nicholson explained, “I’m a person trained to look others in the eyes.  But, I can’t look into the eyes of everyone that looks into mine. I can’t emotionally cope with that kind of volume. My glasses are part of my armour.” Similarly, slip on this Oliver Goldsmith Lord model, made exclusively for The Rake, and you’ll instantly radiate that same aura of aloof empowerment and roguish allure. They represent the perfect accompaniment for late summer evening wear, such as Sciamat's white shawl collared dinner jacket. Imagine the flame of your cigar reflecting in the smoked lenses at dusk. Then, as you stroll along the beach back to your villa at sunrise, accompanied by some outrageously concupiscent haute monde demoiselle, the lenses of your Lords will actually darken in reaction to the light, making them not just damnably stylish but remarkably practical.