Sandra 076 -077

Fine posing by Sandra in one of the earliest big glasses made shortly after 1970. These remarkable glasses were made by the famous Silhouette company from Innsbruck, Austria. Silhouette started its activities in 1964 and they really had their international breakthrough during the mid 1970's. My collection hosts over a hundred Silhouette glasses and it's interesting to see how their style evolved over the years. A few years ago, the Silhouette company kindly fulfilled my request to put a year of manufacture on two dozen of their glasses in my collection. Their glasses are nearly always stamped with a serial number and this enabled me to put an approximate year of manufacture on most of their other glasses as well. Extrapolation of data would suggest that this pair was made around 1972 and this is consistent with my memory of the styles and materials seen in the streets in that year. The early big frames were solid and sometimes even plump. Refined and sometimes even delicate big frames only started emerging in the mid 1970's and they became the main trend near the start of the 1980's. The glasses are fitted with very discrete bifocal lenses and the add suggests that the first owner of the glasses was a lady in her fifties or even sixties. Hat off for this lady, whoever she was - it took some guts to choose a revolutionary frame like this back in 1972!