Hate it as they may, the abject reality of L.A.’s freeway culture informs every Angeleno’s aesthetic. Hence the name of L.A.-based designer Alex Israel’s Freeway Eyewear—if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,wholesale Miu Miu, as the saying goes. But a year after debuting his collection of cool classics, Israel was eager to present the frames in a new—and unconventional—way. He enlisted former creative director of Haus of Gaga Matthew Williams to direct and Jeppe Laursen, who cowrote the anthem “Born this Way,” to compose a short video rendering of still lives to more subtly evoke the brand’s California spirit. “I wanted to showcase the glasses as beautiful objects in the still life vein, and capture an uncanny tension between objectness and surface,” Israel explained of the video, debuting exclusively above, which also introduces the line’s two new styles: the 134 and 105 (Freeway names both, of course). While the emblematic eyewear connotes L.A.’s reigning dictum of understated chic, the video positions the brand as a burgeoning fixture in art. And come fall, artist John Baldessari will be the line’s first artist collaboration.
Freeway Eyewear is available at www.freewayeyewear.com.
—Alexis Brunswick
