l.a.Eyeworks. Director of Communications Brent Zerger interview, April 2026

Stories

l.a.Eyeworks

Brent Zerger

Words Antonella Reina

27/05/2026

Brent Zerger, Director of Communications, conveys the playful and irreverent language of the brand: a blend of design, irony, and imagination conceived to celebrate individuality

What is the best question one could ask you about l.a.Eyeworks? And the worst?
As for the best question (which I have yet to be asked): “What gives l.a.Eyeworks glasses their magical power?” As for the worst, that’s a deep well. But I love the challenge of turning a bad question into a rewarding conversation.

l.a.Eyeworks is...?
An ever-expanding platform of optical imagination.

What is the concept behind the brand?
l.a.Eyeworks is committed to dissolving filters of convention and conformity. our mission is full freedom of expression for everyone. It’s part of what we mean by ‘Uncensored Visions.’ our approach is optimistic, encouraging, and celebratory.

To what extent does the creative environment of Los Angeles influence your sense of proportion, colour, and expressive freedom?
We love the city so much we put it in our name. Los Angeles is a wild and wobbly cradle of diverse cultural production with a short memory and an endless hunger to innovate, reinvent and evolve. In the middle of all this fizzy, breezy brightness, there’s an easy-going freedom of becoming that is an undeniable current running through our work.

In a market often dominated by formal codes, how do you communicate the value of ironic, free design?
Already seasoned opticians, Gai Gherardi and Barbara McReynolds began l.a.Eyeworks as a paradigm
shift away from what they felt was a sea of sameness and predictability in eyewear in 1979. Their impulses were reactionary, and they set out to change the conversation by subverting and inverting accepted notions. In addition to their ground-breaking designs, they also built a rather outrageous world around the glasses that reinforced and expanded the sensibility, whether it was fantastic retail spaces or portrait campaigns or collaborations with artists or our vast vocabulary of puns and slogans. Sometimes ridiculous and often revelatory, those throughlines extend to this day. Perhaps, then, ‘the value’ is communicated by the width of our vision, bolstered by its consistency and forward momentum for more than four decades.

Among your many projects, which one best expresses the playful, unconventional identity of l.a.Eyeworks?
It would be impossible to pick one project as the best, but with this season, we initiated a full-throttle collaboration with the artist/designer duo huntley Muir (Su huntley and Donna Muir) to create our protective frame cases and lens cleaning cloths for 2026. The results are fantastically expressive, offbeat and engaging. They vibrate with heart and humour. We have been engaged in an imaginative conversation with Su and Donna
since they first made an ad layout for l.a.Eyeworks in 1980, one year after the opening of l.a.Eyeworks as a single retail storefront on Melrose Avenue. Like all the artists we work with, their work reflects back to us who we are while also pointing the way to who we might become.

What is the inspiration behind the new collection, and which elements define it most clearly?
Every season, we’re working on multiple fronts to push our ideas forward, sometimes by modulating notions we haven’t finished exploring, and sometimes, by big leaps into the unknown. Colour is always an important indicator of how we work, and in the spring/summer collection alone there are 43 new colours splashed across 16 frame designs. We like to set a big table for dinner. Lots of chairs. Everyone’s invited.

What role do colour, shape, and graphic elements play in building the identity of your frames?
Colour can practically build a frame design. Likewise, a material innovation or a new production technique can also spark ideas into form. The role of all these elements is vital but perhaps most important to building an identity is how they are woven together by the less visible force of inspiration, intuition and imagination.

What feelings do people experience when wearing l.a.Eyeworks glasses?
Ideally, they feel closer to becoming their true selves than ever before. Everything else flows from there.

How does the world look through a pair of l.a.Eyeworks lenses?
Who could possibly say, but I think anytime something gives you a deeper sense of belonging to the world, the perspective is just a little bit sweeter.

Originally published in Eyebook 37

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