The Independent Optician

Required visions

Franca Bochicchio Ottica & Glasstylist  ® DIECIDECIMI  ® – Milano Blogger glasstylist.com, founder of Radio Ottica

Seven months after the beginning of the new world in which we are all facing many difficulties, we can say with good reason that we have never really stopped. The determination and stubbornness of all of us to react to such an anomalous situation has filled and will continue to fill pages of newspapers, journals and many books in every discipline for a long time to come, right up to those of history that will transmit this peculiar period to posterity. The more time goes by, the more I am convinced that what allowed our legs to stop and gave us the strength to put our lives on stand-by was precisely the frantic rush of our thoughts and reflections that spontaneously and incessantly probed every possible solution, every alternative road to the obligatory one that opened up in front of us, throwing light even on those that had not yet been attempted.

Showroom Moscot and Andy Wolf - Bosco Verticale Milano

Showroom Moscot and Andy Wolf - Bosco Verticale Milano

This is the feeling I felt at the beginning of an atypical September everywhere. September has in fact always been the real New Year’s Eve also in the optical sector: everything always started again from this moment of the year when time was marked by the frenetic rhythm both in the shops as a reflection of the new year that was beginning, and in the sector with the big fairs, meetings, conventions and wide-ranging canonical appointments. The great awareness that a lot has changed since a year ago and the need to deal with new demanding safety rules, has brought news that respond to the desire to implement projects and reflections developed in the lockdown, i.e. all the new ideas on how to continue to work preserving the road travelled and directing the future one maybe improving it. Since the beginning of September, private showrooms organized by independent brands have been taking place every weekend in various Italian cities from north to south, inviting opticians to rediscover the pleasure of looking at and touching products, selecting them and, why not, finding in this obvious and now almost revolutionary act, the energy needed to face the period ahead. Their formula is fresh, quick and effective and they are exactly the children of this moment to which they brilliantly respond with their main aim of not stopping and not giving up by focusing on spaces that allow them to communicate their identity to the whole world and safely accommodate a number of people appropriate to the times. The idea is not to deprive oneself of the possibility to describe the product and its novelties, to listen to the opticians and their new needs, to confront each other, to believe in them together, to smile under the masks and to look at each other in the eyes in order to have confirmations that they still have the same objectives as before and maybe even the same tenacity in pursuing them. Small realities that have also thrown their hearts over the obstacle, testifying with their plurality the great determination of this sector not to give up by choosing to move not in a traditional way but with their timing, their steps and their rhythms. I had the desire to go and live these initiatives, to touch the palpable desire to start over and hear from the voice of those who arrived at these alternative solutions, which have nothing approximate, the enthusiasm for a new beginning.

Franca

September is not orphaned of a big event....at least in Italy! In Florence on 19-20-21 September will be again DaTE, a great act of courage that will reopen the doors to as many daredevils in the sector who will meet to discover the novelties of avant-garde eyewear and restart engines in the sector both nationally and internationally.

Showrook Faoflex a Padova Franca with Fabio Stramare

Enjoy Eyewear Again event in Polpenazze del Garda

Do you remember the chessboard by Ferdinand De Saussure, the linguist I mentioned a few articles ago (it was actually September last year...) who was so successful? The chess game to which he had compared the language allowed him to explain and understand its changes because it assimilated it to a system that changes because the change of a single element (the move of a checkmate) changes the whole system. Well, here all the schemes are blown! Chess moved not one at a time but all at once. Now we define the ambitious task for those who have wider views and greater possibilities of aggregation to identify an even newer, even more avant-garde road and pursue it by still joining the forces of those who have never given up as soon as we are out of this tunnel. For the time being, we capture beauty where it expresses itself and try to draw energy from the passion that moves all things in this world where a broad “vision” must always be found.

Enjoy Eyewear Again event in Polpenazze del Garda

VEDERE INTERNATIONAL – September 2020