There was a time when wearing glasses was merely a sign that your eyesight wasn’t quite A1, that you needed a little help with reading or peering into the distance — but that was long, long ago, in a dark time before the dedicated followers of fashion realised that what you wear on your face can be as important as your shirt or your handmade Jimmy Choos.

Think Bono, Jarvis Cocker or Sir Elton John, their pictures plastered across a thousand newspapers, spectacles firmly, if extravagantly, in place. Think Cutler and Gross, an eyewear specialist as far away from your local high street as Aston Martin is from your local Ford showroom, so upmarket that it refuses to hand out free or discounted pairs to celebrities, has only two stores in the UK and one in Hong Kong and yet is featured regularly in fashion photoshoots in Vogue and GQ.

It seems recession-proof, too. Sales increased by 60 per cent in the five months to the end of December, compared with the same period a year before. Indeed, the brand, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary last year, has increased its sales more than fivefold since 2005, when Majid Mohammadi joined as chief executive, and plans to remain on an upward curve.

First, Mr Mohammadi, who bought a significant stake in the company last year, wants to build on the brand’s history of link-ups with well-known designers. In the past year Cutler and Gross has teamed up with Giles Deacon and Erdem to create special ranges. It also signed a deal with Victoria Beckham to produce the handmade sunglasses that she designs to go with her dress label and has just signed a co-branded deal with Comme des Garçons, the fashion label.

It also wants to rent out its production facilities and experience in design to other upmarket fashion brands who want to produce handmade spectacles under their own names. “We want to become the designers’ heaven for glasses and we have a queue of them waiting,” Mr Mohammadi says.

Second, Cutler and Gross is planning to make more super-luxury premium glasses under its own name, with, say, leather or jewels, for sale via premium fashion outlets.

Mr Mohammadi is bullish about prospects: “With luxury goods, people are still buying but they want something more special. They want something they can keep and respect. At the moment we do it privately, maybe three or four bespoke pairs of glasses a week, but we have to make it bigger.”

Rachel Jones, accessories expert for WGSN, a fashion trends website, agrees: “Optical and sunglasses have become a real ‘accessory’ in recent years, with favoured styles and trends of their own. Many people are wearing plain glass lenses right now, which shows just how popular they have become — from necessity and often embarrassment to unapologetic consumers wearing them purely for fashion.”

Yet while the likes of Lady Gaga and Sir Elton my order pairs of outré spectacles by the dozen, befitting their pop star status, Mr Mohammadi, who personally sports a light blue semi-transparent pair, admits that for many ordinary shoppers most of Cutler & Gross’s spectacles are too “bold”.

His plan, therefore, is to broaden the brand’s appeal with a range of optical glasses that will retail at a slightly lower price to the main collection. They will still be handmade, but in only three colours and twelve more basic styles out of the 1,000 presently on Cutler & Gross’s books.

“This will be the bread and butter. Something more accessible and conservative that the man on the street can wear.” Mr Mohammadi emphasises, however, that Cutler and Gross will never be a mass brand. “When you are a true luxury brand, you can’t be big because then you are not exclusive. Our product is attractive because it’s special so we can’t sell it to everybody. It is like the [hand-built] Bristol car — not designed for the school run.”

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