glasses and sunglasses, Porsche | Vintage Sunglasses

Authentic vintage aviator-style sunglasses Made by Porsche Design

Just like the glasses by Dior and Dunhill, the vintage Porsche sunglasses were also produced in the Optyl glasses factory. As Porsche even provided its own designers, however, the glasses by Porsche were not purely licensed products.

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, founded the Porsche Design Studio in 1972 to focus on the design of everyday objects.
The development of high-quality sunglasses to meet the requirements of Porsche customers was one of the first tasks of the Porsche Design Studio.
To be able to implement its own designs, in 1976 Porsche sought cooperation with Optyl, which at that time was already the world's leading eyewear manufacturer with its own CARRERA brand.

The first Porsche Design by CARRERA sunglasses were launched in 1977, which immediately became widely-acclaimed design classics.

Porsche Eyewear with an Innovation: Interchangeable Lenses

These include the large Porsche 5621 men's aviator sunglasses, as well as the identical Porsche 5623 women's sunglasses. Both sunglasses models had the ingenious quick lock, which made it possible to change the sunglass lenses independently. Every pair of Porsche 5621 and every Porsche 5623 vintage sunglasses were delivered with two pairs of interchangeable lenses.
Interestingly, Porsche Design never patented this ingenious mechanism, meaning that other eyewear brands were also later able to offer this system.
In addition to the sunglasses with the interchangeable lenses, Porsche Design Studio also invented other spectacular vintage glasses that not only enthused fans of technology.

The Porsche 5622 folding sunglasses, for example, which fits into almost every pocket. Or the Porsche 5693 foldable sunglasses, which are hardly thicker than an envelope. Or the 5620 ski sunglasses, which achieved special fame through Yoko Ono.

However, numbering each individual model of glasses was the greatest luxury that Porsche and Carrera afforded themselves. Each pair of Porsche Design by CARRERA glasses was engraved with its own serial number and given a corresponding certificate, which was also stamped with the corresponding serial number. Even the packaging was provided with a unique serial number, which was an enormous amount of work. At the Optyl eyeglass factory in Bavaria alone, several employees were busy only documenting the serial numbers.

As the Optyl plants had to be closed at the end of the 1990s, the cooperation between Porsche Design and Carrera Optyl came to an end. With their quality standards in times of Asian competition, they were simply no longer competitive.

Today, the Munich-based Rodenstock Group is holder of the worldwide license to develop, produce and market Porsche Design eyewear and sunglasses.