How Jacques Marie Mage became the name to know in luxury eyewear
By 
WHEN JÉRÔME MAGE started working on his cult-favorite eyewear brand, he had a score to settle. “I heard a lot of times that my ideas were too crazy, too forward, too difficult—they wouldn’t sell,” he says. “And I was curious to see who was right and who was wrong.”
He wasn’t starting from scratch. After moving from Paris to Los Angeles in the mid-’90s, he founded an independent studio that designed sunglasses and performance wear for the action-sports world for 15 years. But with Instagram and influencers changing the game, the brief had shifted from making new things to “creating similar product to what already existed and putting it on celebrities,” he says. “I’m not really good at copying things.”
So in 2012 he started working on the project that, three years later, would become Jacques Marie Mage (a combo of his middle and last names). He wanted to focus on luxury, craftsmanship, collectibility. He decided on eyewear because he knew enough folks to call in a few favours. “And when you start, as a small company,” he says, “you have to ask a lot of favours.” Plus, he wanted to see who was right: him or the naysayers.
Mage was right. His designs quickly became status symbols for artistic types, fashion insiders, and Hollywood A-listers like Jeff Goldblum and Daniel Craig. The bold, beefed-up looks of frames like the Dealan and the Donat made JMM, as fans call it, recognizable from afar. The high-end materials and craftsmanship (first in Japan, with Italy added later) meant they held up on close inspection. And the limited production runs and built-in storytelling—guess who the Dealan is named after (hint: Bob)—meant that each new release was an opportunity to either buy in or miss out.
“A lot of people who buy JMM buy the mystique behind the frame,” Mage says, “not necessarily the frame. I love objects that speak to you. I design objects with a soul.”
Mage’s latest step is bringing that soul to a new store in Manhattan. He tends to hate retail spaces, so he pours himself into each new JMM “gallery,” building expansive narratives to imbue them with life.
In New York, the story is all about blending the urban appeal of art deco—Franco-American, just like JMM—with the wildness of the American West. Mage has long been fascinated by the West, by Native American art and culture, by the power of natural spaces. He works actively for the conservation of wild wolves and partners with national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Teton, their natural habitats. In the N. Y. C. store, there are larger-than-life sculptures of three key Yellowstone species—the grey wolf, the bald eagle, and the bison—surrounded by Art Deco furnishings and adornments.
“The art deco jewelry box that is built around the sculptures of those wild beasts gives it power but also a certain amount of fragility that is very touching,” Mage says. “You have these two powerful American myths: the myth of New York and the myth of the West and the national parks. I thought it would be beautiful to bring them together in one space.”
