The Object
There is a small test we apply to anything that claims a place in a travel case. Does it earn the room it takes. The Persol 714 passes on a technicality that turns out to be the whole point: it folds. Fold the temples in, fold the bridge down, and a pair of sunglasses collapses into something the size of a matchbox that slips into a breast pocket without a case. On the road, that is not a gimmick. It is the difference between a frame you carry and a frame you leave on a café table in Antibes.
The house is Turinese. Giuseppe Ratti founded Persol in 1917, and the name is a contraction of per il sole, for the sun. The flexible Meflecto temple, patented in the 1930s, was the firm's first real idea: a stem that gives against the head rather than gripping it. The 714 came out of an earlier frame, the 649, which Ratti had drawn in 1957 for the tram drivers of Turin who needed something broad enough to shield the eyes from wind and grit. Cut that frame in half at the hinges, add a folding bridge, and in 1960 you had the first folding sunglasses made. Persol still counts ten extra steps of hand assembly that the fold demands.
A good travel object is one you stop noticing, right up until the moment you reach for it and it is exactly where a smaller thing could go.
Then there is the film. Steve McQueen wore the 714 through The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968, and again in Le Mans, and the association has never really loosened. That is the risk with an object this photographed: it can curdle into costume. The 714 does not, mostly because the engineering was never cosmetic. The keyhole bridge, the arrow on the temple, the slight blue cast of the original glass lenses, all of it reads as design that happened to age well rather than nostalgia sold back to you.
We keep a pair for the same reason we keep a good corkscrew. It does one thing, it does it without fuss, and it has already proved it will still be doing it in twenty years. The tribute editions carry McQueen's name inside the arm, which is a little much for our taste. The plain 714, black acetate, green glass, is the one to travel with. Fold it, pocket it, forget it is there until Cala di Volpe throws the light back at you and you are grateful something in the bag was built for exactly this.
