Shopping for glasses over a decade ago was a vastly different experience to the modern approach to purchasing eyewear. In those days you were limited to a smattering of designer styles – Guess, Police, Ralph Lauren among the store’s own brand selection.

Why your local optician store looks more like Fashion Week

Nowadays, not only is it common for glasses to be purchased over the internet without being tried on first, but the sheer number of designer frames is overwhelming. They were everywhere; and names that I would never in a million years have guessed I’d be seeing in an optician store. Ten years on, it’s clear there’s been a dramatic change in the way we buy and the way retailers sell eyewear.

Browsing the online glasses store LensWay, I discovered just how many designer brands have jumped on the prescription lenses bandwagon. I also discovered that they’re not commonly called glasses anymore, but ‘optics’ or ‘eyewear’.

All the big names were there – Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Dior – but so were some unlikely eyewear brands such as Jimmy Choo (better known for making Sarah Jessica Parker five inches taller), Vera Wang (better known for giving Kim Kardashian something to get hitched in); and not just design houses, but lifestyle magazine titles (Vogue, Cosmo), sports brands (Nike, Converse), actresses (Hilary Duff, Catherine Deneuve), and even Harley Davidson. It seems that now, glasses aren’t just a practical way to help the wearer see clearer, but an extension of their personality and a lifestyle choice.

So why this sudden urge for fashion houses to come to the aid of long and short-sighted fashionistas? Obviously this is another way for designers to persuade us to part with our hard-earned cash. It’s clearly a tactic that’s working, or there wouldn’t be this plethora of designers, brands and celebs scrambling to get their signature onto the legs of spectacles. But why glasses? And why now?

It’s all part of the seismic shift that’s well underway in the fashion industry right now. As the world’s belt tightens under the strain of global recession, fashion houses have found the answer – and the answer is another typically convoluted fashion term – the diffusion line. As the amount of money being spent on super high-end couture takes a tumble, designers have found a new way of keeping themselves afloat, and then some.

Diffusion lines are basically design houses’ versions of the Tesco Value range, sold in addition to their eye-wateringly priced couture products. Marc Jacobs launched Marc, Alexander McQueen launched McQ, and you’ll have noticed high street stores teaming up with some unlikely fashion cohorts in recent years; H&M and Lagerfeld, Target and Proenza Schouler.

While critics say the collaborations simply cheapen these once-exclusive brands, the designers are laughing all the way to the bank. Opening up to the High Street has paid dividends, creating a vastly enlarged customer base while making their brands more accessible to emerging economies like Brazil and China where demand for affordable luxury goods is booming with upwardly mobile consumers seeing these purchases as status symbols. As a result, Michael Kors’ diffusion line, Michael, intends to increase its presence in China to an excess of 100 stores over the next five years.

The crux of these diffusion lines is accessories. Consumers might not be able to afford a whole Gucci outfit, but they might be able to afford to treat themselves to a Gucci bag, or a scarf, or a pair of Gucci glasses instead.

As designers continue to concentrate on the ‘middle ground’ of affordable luxury goods to make their bread and butter, lower-end fashion houses are actually seeking to up their prices to create luxury diffusion lines of their own – H&M launching their high-end & Other Stories line, for example. All are seeking to tap into the lucrative affordable luxury goods market, and fashionable frames are just one of the tools they’re using to do it.

Author Bio: Clare Wallace lives in London and has been working in the fashion industry for four years, specialising in designer and high end fashion.