Los Angeles spectacle scholar Guy Gareldi, a Los Angeles spectacle scholar who pioneered the notion that glasses frames don't have to be boring, but could be a fashion statement of personality, and passed away on March 16th at his Hollywood home. She was 78 years old.
Her sister, Heather Gareldi, said the cause was bile duct cancer, which she learned last month.
“Glasses provide spontaneity,” Gherardi told New York Times Magazine in 1993.
“The contacts are strict. They're not interesting,” she added. “You may look better within them, but you don't look better within them.”
Gareldi, a charming personality dressed in bold colours, opened Laewalks, a shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979 with her friend and glasses Barbara McReynolds. Gherardi leads the design of fashionable, limited edition frames known for their sharp angles, unusual shapes and striking shades, and is sold under playful names such as Rooster, Whirly Bird and MX. busy. In 1993, the shop began using lasers to engrave metal frames in patterns such as maps of Southern California and the United States.
“The frame is a representation of pure richness and a secret codeword among like-minded individuals,” wrote Dave Schilling in 2022 in Image, a style magazine for the Los Angeles Times:
The store's early popularity among artists, actors, architects and the LGBTQ community has been bolstered since the early 1980s by a still-intended print advertising campaign in trendy magazines. Filmed by Greg Gorman, they include those famous for Chaka Khan, RuPaul, David Hockney, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones, Paul Rubens and his character Pee We Herman.
Campaign slogan: “Faces are like works of art. It deserves a great frame.”
Gorman said Andy Warhol asked him to join the campaign. The campaign was launched in a magazine with Warhol's interview and expanded to magazines that cater to other hip fashions, such as paper and details.
“Part of the challenge was finding a frame that complements the person's face,” Gorman said in an interview. “Sometimes Guy came in with his quirky glasses and we would always find a way to catapult them into people's faces.”
Store customers include Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Billy Idol and Carrie Fisher. Elton John, known for his outrageous eyewear, also went shopping in the store. There, one design was made for him in custom colors.
After Gareldi's death, the Council of Fashion Designers described her as “a pivotal figure in the eyewear industry.” She was part of a charity that helped the council form a subgroup of eyewear designers in 2014, donating more than $100,000 to LGBTQ causes.
Eyewear designer Blake Kwehara, who worked with Gareldi and three others in rainbow-themed sunglasses for her 2023 Pride Morning, said she “fired the path of being an independent eyewear designer,” adding that “she was grand, elegant and gave her every turn.”
Gai Travelle Gherardi was born in Los Angeles on July 8, 1946 and grew up south in Huntington Beach about an hour. Her mother, Millicent (Selby) Gareldi, owned a women's fashion store. Her father, Fabio Frank Gareldi, built the home and led a band called Fabio's Big Band USA.
Guy surfed in Huntington Beach and got his first job there. It reminded me of seeing Lenny Bruce perform at a nightclub called Golden Bear. She met McReynolds at Huntington High School, and they became close friends. When McReynolds got a job at a Newport Beach eyeglass dealer's store in 1965, she helped Gareldi get hired there as well.
Gherardi explained that he offers his clients glasses as an almost mystical experience.
“I can't explain that,” she said in an interview with the Art Matters Foundation in 2017, where she was a board member. “You put on somebody's glasses, touch your head and look at their eyes,” she added, “eyes, eyewear and glasses are all starting to become this way of communication.”
But she said early frame designs in eyewear were mediocre at best.
“People wore Mac trucks on their faces back then,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2002.
During the Vietnam War, she and McReynolds held a meeting of the Draft of Resistance, helping young men avoid military service by offering glasses a prescription that gave her what they called “unstable” visions.
After working together in Newport Beach, Gareldi took up jobs at other optics stores, while McReynolds worked at a lens company. Still, they dreamed of opening their own store one day. Both were certified opticians.
In 1979 they found a Lae Walk spot on Melrose Avenue, and Gareldi's father built a shop for them.
Some of the shop's first designs came from the 1950s neutral colored frame Zarob from the neutral colored 1950s. “Just color them,” Gareldi told the Arts Questions.
In an interview, Heather Gareldi, an eyeglass company who worked with her sister for 27 years, said, “She says, 'Why is it boring to have fun?'”
La Eyeworks expanded to three outlets, but the second store in Los Angeles closed in 2022 20 years later, while another was Costa Mesa managed by Heather Gherardi, which closed in 2009 21 years later.
The influx of artists became customers, and Gherardi and McReynolds began holding monthly art shows at La Eyeworks. And in 2009, the two women began hiring artists such as Katherine Opie, Allison Saa, Barbara Kruger and Gabriella Lewis.
In addition to her sister, Ms. Gareldi was survived by her life partner Ronda Sabov and her half sisters, Michelle and Rene Gaherardi. McReynolds left the business several years ago.
In 1984, Gareldi was in Gorman's studio in Los Angeles. Film director John Waters' drag queen and muse Divine have arrived for a photo shoot for the Rywalks campaign. She recalled seeing God whose birth name was Harris Glenn Milstead and arrived wearing a suit without makeup or a wig. Three hours after the appearance of God, she said, “In this wonderful pink sequin dress.”
“It was the most transformative moment,” she told Image Magazine. “And part of that was this overwhelming sense of how everyone negotiates and navigates beauty.”
