UK-based Cutler and Gross opened its first North American eyewear boutique in the heart of Toronto’s Yorkville area this past September.

The Cutler & Gross store was designed by Mani Mani from Fishtnk Design Factory. The Yorkville store features a VIP room, aptly called the ‘Museum.’ This room is dedicated to the vintage collection of over 600 styles dating back from 1969 to the present. The front part of the store carries over 4000 pairs of eyewear frames, all hand made in Cutler and Gross’s factory in Northern Italy.

“We want to share with Torontonians our 40 years of eyewear expertise and personalized approach of investing in a pair of quality eyewear frames, which are a key fashion accessory statement,” said Marie Wilkinson, Head of Design for Cutler & Gross.

It can take 4-6 weeks from when a Cutler & Gross stylist helps with style selection and fits the frames on the customer to sending in the custom eyewear order to the Cutler and Gross manufacturing facility in Italy.

Cutler and Gross was founded in 1969 by Graham Cutler and Tony Gross who opened their optical boutique in Knightsbridge stocking hand-made bespoke frames. Through their mutual passion for innovative design, they spearheaded the revolution that turned eyewear from medical necessity into a key fashion accessory.

“Tony Gross and I, we met when we were at college and we landed up in the same class and course. We’d always got on well together and we worked separately in different practices at the time and after two years, we talked about sort of doing something jointly,” says Cutler.

“The practice that I was working on, the premises were being sold, so I had to find somewhere new, so that was the prompt for it. I used to drive in through central London to work and I spotted a shop in Knightsbridge, nearly opposite Harrods, and suggested to Tony that we might do it jointly, and there it all started.”

Their fashion-forward designs became an instant success when launched in 1982 during Paris Fashion Week.

When asked about their beginnings, Cutler muses over the fact that they started out doing everything themselves, including designing frames. “Tony had been designing frames independently himself for two or three years for his friends and I had been doing the same thing in central London, working with another well-known frame designer called Oliver Goldsmith. We moved to Knightsbridge, and I’ll tell you… in glasses, we were doing what was rather different from the current styles available at that stage. Our original decision was, in fact, to have some very simple shapes, like sort of round and oval, and two or three other standard spectacle shapes. We decided to make some variations of that in thick and thin and different colours, large and small, and that’s how we started.”

Cutler & Gross plan to open their second North American store this spring in the United States.