Shady Characters

C100

On Tuesday evening, a very strange thing happened at a New York fashion party: the stiletto-shod ladies in attendance were far outnumbered by dressed-down, regular-looking—some might even say swarthy—dudes. The occasion for this industry anomaly? Sunglass company Oakley’s unveiling of its limited-edition, super-retro Frogskin glasses, which feature art by a handful of graffiti scribblers and graphic designers. Mingling among the testosterone-heavy crowd at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery in Chelsea was number-monikered artist C100, who previously collaborated with Prada on a line of graffiti-print tee-shirts and whose glasses were wrapped in a print of an animated character. Another partygoer was Andrew Petterson, an automotive painter whose fifty different one-of-a-kind pairs of glasses, which will be sold in individual black wooden cases, were inspired by the pinstripes on vintage racing cars. While many of the guests opted to stick close to the display cases, where the various sunglasses—a few with bold hues splashed along the frames, others bedecked with looping, scrawled patterns—hung from invisible string, some ventured into the gallery’s basement to test out the make-your-own-graffiti-tee machine. “I started tagging when I was fifteen,” said C100. “Sunglasses are just another surface for us to do our thing.”