Leah 144

Fielmann is a German chain of optician's shops that made its way up during the 1990's. Their first shop in Holland opened in my own town Enschede, near the German border, in 2003. This opening soon led to a rather extreme competition with the Specsavers from England that landed in my town some years before. Both chains claimed to sell the cheapest glasses and to win the competition, they lowered their standard prices step by step. Needless to say, all the strongly advised "extra's" once you were in the shop were left out in their advertisements. After some weeks, both chains went even further, selling glasses in the streets much the same way it was done in Medieval times. Neither of the two chains gave in and finally, you could buy a pair of glasses for one Euro, standard lenses and all. My daughter Daphne was living with me at the time and she had a prescription just above minus ten. So during this final week of entrepreneurial madness I mentioned to her that this was her chance to get several pairs of glasses for coppers and brass. Daphne was all go for it. She went into one of the shops and ordered three pairs, without any of the extras. She came home in laughter. She'd had a big row with the staff about her refusal to go into any of the extras. Daphne finally got two of the three pairs and she refused the third pair because the lenses were so thick that the glasses could not be folded up. I don't know what she did with the glasses afterwards, she never appeared in any of them but we had a good laugh and that was the main thing. The competition between both chains ended in a draw and very soon prices in both shops were back to normal. The shops still exist, one block apart from each other.

Anyway, Fielmann occasionally has nice frames and this pair shown by Leah is one from my collection. I got the glasses just across the border in Germany, a few years back, in the slipstream of my third exhibition with "Ladies behind crystal veil" in 2011. Generally speaking, glasses from the retro era are hardly of interest to the collector but this pair had a simple but nice frame and it was fitted with lenses of minus ten. Shortly afterwards, I had my first photo shoot with Claudine, a nice lady in the know, with an unusually narrow face. Claudine is a full time glasses wearer (minus four) who is often in despair when she needs a new pair. She said that none of the optician's shops have frames that suit her face so she was interested to do a photo shoot in vintage glasses from my collection. I dug out three dozen pairs that might suit her PD of 55 mm, including the newly acquired Fielmann pair and we did the photo shoot.at Nel's place. The Fielmann glasses were by far the best match of all. With this in mind, I brought the Fielmann glasses over to Ireland and the story repeated itself. Leah has a very different facial structure as Claudine but the same PD. And lo and behold, the Fielmann glasses worked great for Leah as well. Judge for yourself and feel free to disagree. I decided to dwell a bit longer on the Fielmann glasses and it yielded one of the best series of Leah's photo shoot.