SUMMER RAYNE OAKES EYEWEAR

Summer Rayne Oakes is on a mission to make eco sexy. She has built a career on the not-so-surprisingly effective fusion of activism with being really hot. In addition to her work as an author, consultant, host and speaker, the self-described eco-model lends both her expertise and face to brands ready to make the leap into environmentally friendly products. Following up on partnerships with Payless ShoeSource and Portico Home, Oakes is now launching an eyewear collection with Modo.

“I’m always out there looking for brands that share my values in different verticals and a friend connected me with Modo, which was already planning this line of recycled eyewear,” Oakes says of joining the project. “What’s cool about it is that a lot of times I come into a brand that hasn’t discovered an environmental way of designing yet, so it was a real benefit coming into something that was already well-understood.”

Modo Eco by Summer Rayne Oakes is made out of 95% certified recycled metal and plastic—essentially everything but the lenses. Modo, which also produces eyewear collections for Derek Lam and 3.1 Phillip Lim, even throws in a case made from recycled soda bottles, a box made from recycled paper and soy ink, and your very own tree to be planted by Trees for the Future. “With any vertical you can think, Ugh, eco looks a certain way, but these are invisibly so,” Oakes says, making it clear that the granola look doesn’t have to go hand-in-hand with sustainability. “With eco eyewear it’s always the bamboo,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “They don’t even feel structurally sound. The line that we’re coming out with, we have an aviator with wood stems—but it doesn’t look quirky; it looks sharp.”

Working with a company that already understood sustainable production left Oakes free to become more involved in the creative process than in past projects, and she pulled ideas right from her own backyard. “It’s hard not to be inspired when you’re living in the hippest part of Brooklyn,” Oakes says about her home in Williamsburg, where ultra-cool eyewear is a wardrobe essential. She came to the design team with hyper-retro ’50s-style moodboards and sketches. “I have this grand Katy Perry-esque idea of what glasses should look like, and then the design team pared it down to vintage with a modern twist,” she says.

The outcome is optics and sunglasses with subtle cateye shapes, thick frames, thick stems and cool touches like a pop of color on the inside. While they won’t appeal to wallflowers, Oakes has certainly put together a line that her fellow Williamsburg residents can rock for a good cause without losing their cool factor.

Modo Eco by Summer Rayne Oakes is now available at the Eco Village Store, 52 University Place, New York, and online at ModoShop.com.

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