Francesco Carrozzini Is Shaking Up the Sunglasses Game

Francesco Carrozzini, the 36-year-old filmmaker and photographer, has long flirted with the fashion industry. As the son of late Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani, he was basically born directly into the center of it. Like his mother, Carrozzini became an imagemaker, though he’s always kept the family business, as it were, at arm’s length: besides a Zegna campaign here and a L’Uomo Vogue cover there, his career has focused mainly on portraiture, music videos for the likes of Beyonce and Marilyn Manson, and documentary. But over time, Carrozzini developed an itch. “I was dying to do something that was out of what to me was the ordinary,” he says. “I really wanted to have the feeling of having made something.”

So when a group of entrepreneurs approached Carrozzini with an unusual request—would he be interested in designing a pair of sunglasses for their startup brand?—he didn’t hesitate to scratch. “I was like, yeah, why not?” he tells me over the phone from Seville, Spain. The brand, Children of Ra, launches today with Carrozzini’s specs. Part of the appeal of the project was, of course, the opportunity to craft a pair of luxury shades with his name carved into the arm. But Carrozzini was also intrigued by Children of Ra’s business model. The brand, started by folks from non-fashion backgrounds, is meant to function like a “record label for eyewear,” Carrozzini says. Children of Ra will recruit stylish men and women from creative industries to, essentially, launch their own mini eyewear lines. It’s an interesting proposition in an era increasingly swarmed by direct-to-consumer startups at one end of the spectrum, and luxury brands investing heavily in their accessories on the other. Anyway, the merch-ification of everything has proven that there’s a market for fashion driven by personal brands. Your favorite photographer or style influencer might already have T-shirts to sell. What if they also had sunglasses?

Like any fancy Italian bon vivant, Carrozzini already had more shades on deck than he knew what to do with. “I have hundreds of pairs,” he says. But he could never find the retro style he'd seen in movies and archival photographs—a slightly feminine ’60s shape worn by uber-masculine guys like Sean Connery (as James Bond) and Aristotle Onassis. His thoughts strayed closer to home, too. “I obviously intended them for myself,” he says. “As anyone who has never designed anything, I said, what would look good on me?” He began to obsessively research these vintage eyewear designs in order to execute his own pair. (“I barely can write, so drawing them was out of the question,” Carrozzini says, laughing.) Though Connery and Onassis's personal style has been well trod, their eyewear has never felt more fresh. “Their glasses always have a curve at the temple,” Carrozzini says. “If you pick these glasses up and look at them in your hand you’d think they are ladies' glasses, but they always looked so good on these guys and added to their style.” The final product reflects the nearly two years spent on design and production, and while it wasn’t intended as such, is being offered as a unisex style. Carrozzini says he was surprised that, of all the eyewear that’s out there, there was still an original design left to make. “I walk in Barneys, I walk in Bergdorfs, I walk everywhere, and I don’t see any sunglasses like these.”

The price point, for now, is comparable to luxury eyewear brands, but the initial run is strictly limited edition—an important point for Carrozzini, who has been known to spend his weekends in L.A. waking up at 4:00 a.m. to hit the Rose Bowl flea market. “I like to find things that no other people can have,” Carrozzini says. (We believe him: his custom tailoring has landed him on Vanity Fair’s international best dressed list.) Only 330 pairs of his shades have been made, and while there are plans to make the first model in different colors, when this initial run is gone, it’ll be...well, gone. Carrozzini says he is currently working on an even more exclusive version of the 001—an edition of only five pairs, made out of solid titanium. “I was like, OK, have glasses of this size ever been made [in titanium]?” he says. “The answer was no. I was like great, we’ll make it.”

Is Carrozzini ready to jump all the way into the fashion world? He says he’s hooked on eyewear for now, and hard at work on his next two editions for Children of Ra. He’s also assisting the company in getting new designers on board. But he’s got plenty of projects for his main hustle lined up, like casting his first feature film, Midnight Sun, based on the Scandinavian crime novel of the same name, and has an idea for his second documentary. (His first, Franca, based on his relationship with his mother, is currently available on Netflix.) Will Children of Ra rock the eyewear world as its first “record label?” That certainly remains to be seen, but Carrozzini’s future as an eyewear designer, at the very least, appears bright.