Trying on Eyewear Like It's a Tea Ceremony
Jacques Marie Mage frames its frames better than anyone else. Every new store (or gallery, as the brand prefers to call them) is a stage, turning glasses into artifacts you want to linger over.
Founded in Los Angeles by French designer Jérôme Mage, JMM is known for limited-edition eyewear crafted in Japan and Italy, bold frames that sit somewhere between modern heirlooms and cultural curiosities.
And the brand’s elegant glasses all but insist on being experienced in their architectural spaces.
The latest stage is in Omotesandō, Tokyo, where JMM enlisted Shinichiro Ogata’s studio Simplicity to design a suitably elegant three-story gallery.
To enter, you step through a “Mother Ship” threshold made of hinoki wood, descend into a basement atelier where JMM's eyewear is hand-finished, then climb into a salon filled with antiques, whiskey, and objects pulled from Mage’s own archive.
Tea and wagashi, Japanese treats, become part of the choreography.
These are “fitting moments to unravel the stories condensed into these small crafted products,” said JMM itself.
London saw JMM lean opulent with Jacques Garcia’s maroon gentlemen’s club aesthetic. Tokyo is quieter, more understated. Ogata’s ethos of “favoring the deliberate over the decorative, the ritual over the routine,” mirrors Mage’s own design language, where spectacle is balanced by the human touch.
Every setting, every material, even the ma — a Japanese term for the "negative space" that shapes finished works — of this store is designed to slow shoppers down until merely trying on eyewear has the purposefulness of a tea ceremony.
The only way to give JMM's handcrafted frames the weight they deserve, it's clear, is to set them in a space as intentional as them.
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