Reimagining the future of mankind in a post-industrialised era and taking control of technology one pair of glasses at the time, the highly conceptualised eyewear manufacturer VAVA shaped an exclusive optical collection for ENTRANCE — 10 pairs of super fashionable, 100% sustainable glasses to clear our perspective on fashion and the contemporary world. Here’s what you need to know.
By Diana Colcer
Photography: Christian Tudose
Styling: Amir Doboș
VAVA x Entrance limited edition glasses with aluminium frames and glass lenses. All pairs are numbered and certified. Available NOW to shop at ENTRANCE.
Making an entrance as the 4th high profile collaboration to mark our 10 years anniversary is the exclusive, limited edition of optical eyewear by highly conceptual manufacturer VAVA. The VAVA X Entrance capsule collection consists of only 10 pairs of glasses fully embodying the principles of VAVA, as well as its impeccable design and “obsession” with sustainable quality. And to make it quite clear what is truly special about VAVA eyewear we’ve prepared a comprehensive guide and introduction to its addictive designs, philosophy and spirit, as follows.
VAVA x Entrance limited edition glasses with aluminium frames and glass lenses. All pairs are numbered and certified. Available NOW to shop at ENTRANCE.
THE FRAME
VAVA’s eyewear’s frames are almost exclusively made of handmade cellulose acetate, from the Italian brand Mazzuchelli. Produced since 1849, the Mazzucchelli acetate is considered by many the best acetate in the world — and the company, one of the most innovative in the field of plastics. As of late, VAVA is using their new, 100% recyclable and exclusive “eco-friendly” line. It is a cellulose acetate produced from cotton and wood-pulp fibres, manufactured using substances from renewable sources. The new material keeps all the aesthetics and performance characteristics of the traditional acetate, and the brand takes real pride on avoiding mass production.
THE HINGE
VAVA believes the Bauhaus was the real foundation which simple design used to its full potential and so, the simple shapes — square, rectangle, circle and triangle — became basic forms standing at the core of all VAVA designs. The VAVA hinge is very much influenced by Sol Lewitt, believing all structures originate from the cube. Major works of this american artist, linked to conceptual art and minimalism, have deeply influenced the minimalism in fashion, specially the basic building blocks of this artist’s three-dimensional works. The idea is that inside the cube rotates a cylinder in a fully integrated mechanism. It is a cube made of high quality designed meta, produced by an industrial cutting process developed in close cooperation with our supplier. VAVA uses aerospace aluminium, a super light material with great physical and mechanical properties.
Boris Chimp 504 audiovisual commissioned by VAVA.
VAVA associates the highly conceptual language of machinery and the arts. Squares, circles and rectangles are the most common shapes in the industrial world. Much of the man-made world is composed of these shapes.
THE LENSES
Another key aspect of VAVA is the use of crystal lenses. This reinforces the unique nature of the brand. VAVA believes that only the natural purity of glass can ensure the best optical precision of a lens and the inalterability of its characteristics in time, along with its typical and unique transparency. VAVA uses exclusively Barberini lenses, which, for many years Barberini has been synonym of excellence in the optical glass sun lenses segment. Barberini was among the first companies in the field to achieve the UNI EN ISO 14001 Environmental Certification, having achieved by today on its plant’s zero-waste status. VAVA is unique in using flat lenses across all range. Aesthetically flat lenses can be traced back to the industrial design of the eighties, where geometrical flat forms where very considered fashionable. In VAVA’s philosophy, flat lenses are also thought to be a “glass wall” separating the wearer from the rapid society we live in, so the user can retain a dose of asceticism.
VAVA x Entrance limited edition glasses with aluminium frames and glass lenses. All pairs are numbered and certified. Available NOW to shop at ENTRANCE.
THE PHYLOSOPHY
The spirit of VAVA — an eyewear manufacturer with a strong conceptual identity — is derived from today’s post-industrial society and the growing belief of belonging to a post-human age.
Boris Chimp 504 audiovisual commissioned by VAVA.
VAVA is visionary and strives for a contemporary pared back look in conjunction with the futurism, conceptualism and purism.
Established in 2003, by Portuguese designer Pedro Passos da Silva in Berlin, and created in collaboration with Giordano Cazzola and Beate Leinz (formerly, an eyewear designer for Prada), VAVA’s aim is to become a wearable philosophy and its highly conceptual approach to eyewear “speaks” both the language of machinery in a post-human future and the emotional dialect of the arts. VAVA’s mission is to represent the mankind being in control of the technological world and, at the same time, in control of himself, expressing the antithesis between acceleration and rest. At the core of VAVA stands its fascination with the post-industrial world in which cities like Detroit or Berlin, once symbols of industrial prosperity, were forced to reinvent themselves to ensure survival. At the same time, in the eighties, the Techno movement emerged as a significant step in this process of rebirth, leaning towards the creation of a Techno City, the city of the future, where technology would emerge as a salvation.
VAVA x Entrance limited edition glasses with aluminium frames and glass lenses. All pairs are numbered and certified. Available NOW to shop at ENTRANCE.
In an environment of high-speed culture, turbo capitalism, media overload, digital revolution, ecstasy of consumption, mega trends and accelerated culture, VAVA eyewear represents deceleration, purism and metaphysics. The structure and design of the eyewear presented by VAVA — founded on the principles of sustainability, simplicity, cleanness and purity — is not just physical, but creative as well. It allows the wearer the spiritual space needed to focus on a “mind over matter” asceticism and a personal dose of reinterpreted perspective. VAVA’s mission? Representing an individual in control of the technological world and re-imagining the future. One pair of glasses at the time.
