Some artifacts belong behind glass. This one belongs on your face.
Quavo’s handmade polished-aluminum QRÖMELIFE glasses—the pair staring out from the cover of QRÖMELIFE, his new Pharrell-produced album—are now available for preorder on Complex. The price is $275—pocket change for the permanent collection.
The glasses were designed by Malcolm Ransome, a Dover Street Market alum. Quavo pulled Ransome into his orbit after spotting his chrome-toe Air Forces, and has since said that the designer has “a baby Virgil mindset.”
Each pair of glasses is handmade from polished aluminum (because of course it is), making this less eyewear than an exploration in physical typography, a monument to an album title that happens to perch on the bridge of your nose. No one has ever demonstrated more clearly that the line between accessory and sculpture is purely theoretical. Critics are already calling it the most important face accessory of the year.
The glasses debuted as the visual thesis of the QRÖMELIFE era. Over the last month, Quavo has been seen everywhere wearing the glasses, from the ComplexCon floor to the stage on WWE Sunday Night and his music video for “Backwards.”
In his recent Idea Generation interview, Quavo described QRÖMELIFE (pronounced “chrome life”) as the hardened state he entered after losing Takeoff, a concept he arrived at with Pharrell in the studio: “Whenever life brings you something different, how are you going to react to it, how are you going to make it yours?” Chrome, he explained, is a reflection—“a hologram state of life.” The glasses are his chrome shell, made wearable.
The iconography is already spreading. Quavo’s 530 Chrome merch line includes t-shirts depicting various characters wearing the frames—among them Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, and Janet Leigh in her Psycho shower scene, now living the QRÖMELIFE.
So consider the opportunity. For $275—less than a good seat, less than a weekend away—you can own the defining image of Quavo’s groundbreaking new era.
Twenty-five years from now, when QRÖMELIFE frames have rendered all other eyewear obsolete, you can say you were there at the beginning.
The future is waiting to sit on your face.
