It was 1917 in Turin when Giuseppe Ratti created a pair of glasses that in just a few years would become the favourite model for U.S. airforce pilots – smart and reliable, they were soon known as “The Protector” glasses. By the beginning of the Twenties, the lenses were in glass and eighteen years later the name arrived that everyone still knows today: Persol (per-il-sole, for the sun).

Nowadays, the glasses are made up of 41 pieces, all assembled in Italy, just as in the past. Persol also marks each model with its signature Supreme Arrow metal hinge and the Meflecto flexible stem system. Patented in the late thirties, Meflecto is the first system in the world designed to make the rods more flexible and ensure maximum comfort; still today a technology without any equal in the market.

To celebrate one hundred years of craftsmanship and success, the brand has decided to tell the story of the birth of its two most iconic models - the 649 and 714. Birth of an Icon is Persol’s new campaign featuring two videos that show how Persol glasses take shape, describing in microscopic detail the materials that compose them and each processing phase.

The global success of the brand has its roots in an incomparable level of craftsmanship. Today, as then, Persol glasses are composed of over 40 components, produced and assembled in Italy, still by hand, as it was at the beginning: scrupulously perfect, complex and precise.

The campaign’ success has also been confirmed by the quick sellout of the limited edition of the iconic 714 in honey, directly inspired from Persol’s archives.