Gai Gherardi, a Los Angeles optician who with a partner attracted a celebrity clientele by pioneering the notion that eyeglass frames did not have to be dull but rather could be fashion statements of individuality, died on March 16 at her home in Hollywood. She was 78.
Her sister, Heather Gherardi, said the cause was bile duct cancer, which she learned she had last month.
“Glasses afford spontaneity,” Ms. Gherardi told The New York Times Magazine in 1993. “They offer the possibility of a multitude of changes in your persona; they’re a great accessory, a great prop.”
“Contacts are rigid. They’re no fun,” she added. “You may see better in them, but you can’t look better in them.”
A gregarious personality who dressed in bold colors, Ms. Gherardi opened her shop, L.A. Eyeworks, on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 1979 with her friend and fellow optician Barbara McReynolds. Ms. Gherardi led the design of fashionable, limited-edition frames that are known for their sharp angles, unusual shapes and striking hues and marketed with playful names, like Rooster, Whirly Bird and Mx. Busy. In 1993, the shop began using lasers to engrave metal frames with patterns, like maps of Southern California and the United States.
“The frames are both an expression of pure opulence and a secret code word between like-minded individuals,” Dave Schilling wrote in 2022 in Image, The Los Angeles Times’s style magazine, “signaling that you took have a sense of humor about yourself, that you too are different.”
The early popularity of the store among artists, actors, architects and the L.G.B.T.Q. community has been enhanced since the early 1980s by a print advertising campaign, still ongoing in trendy magazines, that has featured more than 200 black-and-white portraits of celebrities and other luminaries wearing glasses from L.A. Eyeworks. Photographed by Greg Gorman, they’ve included Chaka Khan, RuPaul, David Hockney, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Paul Reubens, famous for his character Pee-wee Herman.
The campaign’s slogan: “A face is like a great work of art. It deserves a great frame.”
Mr. Gorman said that Andy Warhol had asked to be in the campaign, which was launched in Mr. Warhol’s Interview magazine and expanded into other hip, fashion-conscious magazines like Paper and Details.
“Part of the challenge was to find frames that complemented the person’s face,” Mr. Gorman said in an interview. “Sometimes Gai would come over with outlandish glasses, and we’d always find a way to catapult them onto people’s faces.”
The shop’s customers have included Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Billy Idol and Carrie Fisher. Elton John, who is known for his outrageous eyewear, also shopped at the store, where one design was made for him in a custom color.
After Ms. Gherardi’s death, the Council of Fashion Designers described her as a “pivotal figure in the eyewear industry.” She helped the council form a subgroup of eyewear designers in 2014 and was part of a philanthropic venture that has donated more than $100,000 to L.G.B.T.Q. causes.
Blake Kuwehara, an eyewear designer who collaborated with Ms. Gherardi and three others on rainbow-themed sunglasses for Pride Month in 2023, said in a statement that she had “blazed a path for independent eyewear designers,” adding, “She was grand, gracious, and giving at every turn.”
Gai Travelle Gherardi was born on July 8, 1946, in Los Angeles and grew up about an hour south in Huntington Beach. Her mother, Millicent (Selby) Gherardi, owned a women’s fashion store. Her father, Fabio Frank Gherardi, built residential housing and led a band he called Fabio’s Big Band USA.
Gai surfed at Huntington Beach and got her first job there, at a nightclub called the Golden Bear, where she recalled seeing Lenny Bruce perform. She met Ms. McReynolds at Huntington High School, and they became close friends. When Ms. McReynolds got a job at an optician’s shop in Newport Beach in 1965, she helped Ms. Gherardi get hired there, too.
Ms. Gherardi described providing eyeglasses for her customers as an almost mystical experience.
“I can’t explain it,” she said in a 2017 interview with Art Matters Foundation, of which she was a board member. “You put glasses on someone, you touch their head, and you look in their eyes.” She added, “Eyes and eyewear and glasses all started to become this way of communicating.”
But, she said, frame design in her early days in eyewear was prosaic at best.
“People were wearing Mack trucks on their faces back then,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “The choice was mostly between butterfly shapes in pink with rhinestones and basic models in black or tortoise shell.”
During the Vietnam War, she and Ms. McReynolds held meetings of draft resisters and helped young men avoid military service by providing them with glasses with prescriptions that gave them what she called “wonky” vision.
After working together in Newport Beach, Ms. Gherardi took jobs at other optical shops and Ms. McReynolds worked for a lens company. Still, they dreamed of opening their own store one day; both were certified opticians.
In 1979, they found a spot for L.A. Eyeworks on Melrose Avenue, and Ms. Gherardi’s father built the store for them.
Some of the shop’s first designs came from dyeing, in various colors, a trove of 1950s-era neutral-colored frames. “Just putting a color on them,” Ms. Gherardi told Art Matters, “and putting them on a beautiful woman who would never wear something like that; all of a sudden, ‘Oh, my God,’ you’re just looking at this as design.”
Heather Gherardi, who is also an optician and who worked with her sister for 27 years, said in an interview, “She would say, ‘Why be boring when you can have fun?’”
L.A. Eyeworks expanded to three outlets, but a second shop in Los Angeles closed in 2022 after 20 years, and another, in Costa Mesa, which Heather Gherardi managed, closed in 2009 after 21 years.
With an influx of artists becoming customers, Ms. Gherardi and Ms. McReynolds began holding monthly art shows at L.A. Eyeworks. And in 2009, the two women began to hire artists — including Catherine Opie, Alison Saar, Barbara Kruger and Gabriela Ruiz — to turn ordinary lens-cleaning cloths into microfiber pieces of art.
In addition to her sister, Ms. Gherardi is survived by her life partner, Rhonda Saboff, and her stepsisters, Michelle and Rene Gherardi. Ms. McReynolds retired from the business some years ago.
In 1984, Ms. Gherardi was at Mr. Gorman’s studio in Los Angeles when Divine, the drag queen and muse of the filmmaker John Waters, arrived for a photo shoot for the L.A. Eyeworks campaign. She recalled watching Divine, whose birth name was Harris Glenn Milstead, arrive in a suit, without any makeup or a wig. Divine’s emergence three hours later, she said, “in this fantastic pink sequined dress,” moved her to tears.
“It was the most transformative moment,” she told Image magazine. “And part of it was this overwhelming feeling of how everyone negotiates and navigates to beauty.”