Behold the Tina Fey 8002s.
I'm a little torn about this. Content creators are finding it increasingly difficult to get paid for their work, so I generally don't have a problem with licensing deals if they allow a brilliant talent like Fey to line her pockets.
But I think it's a little silly to license an accessory that's not particularly spacial. Unlike, say, America Ferrera's bright red Ugly Betty frames, there are hundreds of frames that look just like Liz Lemon's glasses. It's really easy to find glasses that look like this (the pair that Tina Fey wears on TV are apparently made by Gucci--wouldn't that make the Gucci model the real Tina Fay frame?). If you bought these simply because you wanted to achieve the Tina Fey look and had not figured out how to do this before, you may be, in Tina Fey's words, a dum-dum.
That said, I might be ascribing inaccurate motives to hypothetical shoppers. What if people bought these frames not because they wanted to look like Tina Fey, but because it's freaking amazing that a smart, nerdy woman is marketing a product for other smart, nerdy (looking) women?
These frames are about as distinctive and rare as a pair of GAP jeans, but they have a genuine creative connection to her work. They make sense. It's not like she's selling the "Tina Fey celebrity diet" or the "Tina Fey GoBlonde! highlighting kit" (Amy Poehler could sell hair bleach if she wanted). This product celebrates her nerdy, smart-girl status, and I am totally into that. She may well be the only female celebrity with a glasses line who is actually famous for wearing glasses, and that makes the kind of good sense I definitely associate with Ms. Fey.
I think that you have this one wrong, Ms Deluxe. There's no way that those frames are officially licensed by Tina Fey or NBC or the original eye wear designer or whoever would be able to license them. The same company sells Johnny Depp frames.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.clearlycontacts.ca/glasses/frames/johnny-depp-8005/prod28023.html
These frames made me do some Gogglin' when I originally saw them. I found no evidence of these being licensed designs. Most of the $38 frames from Clearly Contacts are manufactured in China, are copies of other popular frames, and are branded specifically for Clearly Contacts. My cheap frames are branded as 'Joseph Marc', which in my 23 years of wearing corrective lenses and countless days of shopping at many different physical & virtual optical stores, had never seen before.
Anyway, back to the Fey's & Depp's. I assume that these frames are the result of China's lax copyright laws. I don't know what this means when they are sold in other countries.
Maybe, I'm completely wrong, but if so, it's weird that stars would license out their eye wear and then have it sold at the lowest possible price point. That's $38 for frames AND lenses.
Dear Dave: I am convinced. This makes way more sense than what I was saying.
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