By Alexandra Peng
Founder of Prolouge Vision / Designer of TC CHARTON & Alexandra Peng Collections
When I first envisioned the TC CHARTON collection, I had only one simple mission in mind — I wanted to offer beautiful and chic eyewear products to Asian Americans. More precisely, all Asian people who reside in this great country. As one of them, I want to do something for my fellow Asian Americans who work so hard to be an integral part of this nation, and call this land our own, even if we are only 12 % of its entire population. Sometimes, we must work harder to prove ourselves. Sometimes, we must face conflicting sets of values that are different than our ancestors’ cultural heritages. As much as we feel just as American as everyone else, we look different than a Caucasian person. Being a “minority” is challenging at times, but feeling bad about how we look shouldn’t be one of them. We are simply built differently.
TC CHARTON is here to offer you glasses that are designed with your specific facial structure in mind. So when you wear them, you don’t have to wish you had Caucasian features just so the glasses won’t slide down or sit on your cheeks. You no longer need to secretly wish for plastic surgery every time you feel frustrated while shopping for glasses!
Of course, diversity is a beautiful thing. It is what makes this nation so great, and it is the inevitable future. As the world gets smaller, people from different parts of the world mingle, interracial marriages are becoming more and more common, and we are witnessing a shift from what used to be “normal” and the so called “standard”. We are creating the new norms, and the world is a better place because of it. Esthetically TC CHARTON is true to the American sense of style, but technically they are shaped and built to NOT fit the same as conventional eyewear.
I am not here to exclude, I am here to include ALL of us who used to feel excluded and forgotten by the eyewear industry.
The old “standard fit” is still good for the majority, but it is not for me, nor you. Every season, I try to offer different designs that can serve a specific need: faces with extremely low bridges, faces that are very wide, faces with very high arches, faces with very small PDs…For 2014, we are including some sophisticated styles for petite men and women, and more styles for people with low but wider bridges.
Only recently I started to notice that we have a following of Black Americans and Blasians (Black American and Asian mix) and also Latinos. We even have some Caucasian fans! While I am extremely happy about the fact that my products are serving a much wider demography that I hadn’t thought of before, it also makes me wonder whether I was wrong all along to call this collection “Asian Fit”.
I didn’t mean to exclude. I want my products to be worn by anybody who needs them. Everybody deserves glasses that fit and are beautiful at the same time.
After months of pondering over this and even taking online polls through our Facebook page, I am finally at peace with myself. I know my collection is the antithesis of exclusion, and my fans know it too. While I must not forget that most of my inspiration comes from Asian faces, and therefore TC CHARTON is foremost an Asian Fit collection, I am thrilled and happy to know that our products are also serving some of my fellow Americans of other ethnicities.
This photo shoot is my response to all of our fans that are NOT Asians — I present to you, Eldridge Henderson, my incredibly handsome Black model, who flew in from San Francisco to be part of our shoot.
Among hundreds of models’ portfolios, Eldridge caught my eye because I saw a picture of him wearing a pair of Ray Ban frames and while his wardrobe and pose were impeccable, I noticed that the frames were not sitting properly on his nose bridge. That’s when I knew he would be perfect in this photoshoot. This is not the first time that I have designed styles to fit nose bridges that are wide and low, but it is the first time that we found the right model to showcase this style.
This is my way of saying Thank You to ALL of You.
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