What are cat eye glasses?

Cat eye glasses are eyeglass frames that are upswept in the corners where the frames meet the temples, generally with an elongated look which is similar to that of a cat’s eyes. Cat eye glasses were popular mainly during the 1950’s and 1960’s as women’s vintage glasses, but if we dig deeper we can find its roots as far back as the 1930’s.

The earliest source of inspiration for cat eye glasses was a woman named Altina Schinasi. Born in 1907 in NYC, she went to Paris soon after graduation to study art. After graduating she settled in NYC and took her first job as a window dresser. It was during this period that she invented Harlequin Glasses. The inspiration came in the 1930’s as she was walking by an optician’s office and noticed how boring all eyeglasses were at the time.

In her own words (from the documentary film “Altina”) “I thought, well, something better can be done than just these awful glasses that look like the time of Benjamin Franklin, Then I thought, what would be good on a face and I thought of a mask, a Harlequin mask.”

Altina used the romantic Harlequin mask worn at plays and ballroom dances as a starting point and began to cut masks into frames. She set up a Company, production and sales channels. Thus the first cat eye shaped Harlequin glasses were born.