l.a.Eyeworks began on September 9, 1979 when Barbara McReynolds and Gai Gherardi opened a single storefront on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California. The original whim for this adventure? To challenge the prevailing norms of eyewear with proposals for a new, provocative revelation of the face. More than four decades and hundreds of frame designs later, l.a.Eyeworks remains a privately owned house of optical imagination.