There are only ever four places to put your reading glasses, and three of them are wrong.
On your head, where they slide off and eventually snap. Hanging from your shirt placket by one temple, where they stretch the buttonhole and fall out when you bend forward. Set down on a table, which is how most glasses in the world are lost. Or in a case in your bag, which is correct, and which means you will not have them when you need to read a menu in a dark restaurant.
The traditional fix was the eyeglass chain: two rubber loops on a length of metal or beaded cord, gripping the temple tips. It works. It is also, and there is no polite way around this, the single most ageing accessory a person can wear. The rubber loops perish, the chain tangles in a collar, and the whole arrangement announces something about the wearer that most wearers would prefer not announced.
The chain solved the problem and created a worse one, which is why almost nobody who needed it would wear it.
What Elizabeth Faraut did
LA LOOP was founded in Los Angeles in 1999 by Elizabeth Faraut, who came at it from fashion rather than optics. Her insight was that the object needed to stop being a medical-adjacent device and start being jewellery that happened to hold glasses.
So she inverted the design. Instead of two grippers at the ends of a chain, she put a single loop at the bottom of a necklace. The temple of the glasses slips through the loop, the weight of the frame keeps it seated, and the glasses hang at the sternum, front and centre, like a pendant. Nothing clamps onto the frame. Nothing perishes. And when the glasses come off the loop, what remains around your neck reads as a necklace rather than as an empty harness.
The engineering that makes it work is the part you never see. The loop is mounted on a patented swiveling hinge with 360-degree rotation, so the frame can turn freely as you move instead of twisting the cord or fighting your shirt. That hinge is the whole invention. Without it the glasses would spin, tangle and eventually be flung sideways every time you stood up.
Why it counts as design rather than product
The clearest outside validation came early, when the buyer for the Museum of Modern Art Design Store recognised it as a genuine design invention rather than another accessory, which is a distinction MoMA’s store takes seriously and which set the brand’s direction permanently.
That is the right way to read it. Faraut did not improve the eyeglass chain. She created a new category, in the way that a good design solves the underlying problem and quietly makes the previous solution look like a workaround. There had been eyeglass chains for a century and a half. There had never been an eyeglass necklace.
The materials, and the men’s question
The range runs a long way. Supple leathers and waxed cords, modern acetate, sterling and plated silver, 14-karat gold, horn, hand-strung beads, coral, turquoise and gemstones. Pieces are hand-finished and assembled by artisans, and the collections turn over seasonally the way a jewellery line does rather than the way hardware does.
There is also Le Collier, a later and separately patent-pending idea that integrates actual magnifying readers into the necklace itself, in materials like black horn and tortoise, so the lenses are the pendant. That one is cleverer than it first sounds: it removes the frame from the equation altogether.
For men, the answer is the plain end of the range. A dark leather or waxed cord with a brushed gunmetal or oxidised silver loop, no beads, no colour, nothing that catches light. Worn under a jacket with the glasses hanging at the sternum, it looks like a considered choice. The brand has built out gunmetal and darker hardware specifically for this, and it is the version I would point any man toward.
How to wear one properly
Get the length right, and err short. Too long and the frames swing into a table when you lean forward, which is how lenses get scratched. Roughly to the sternum is correct.
Slip one temple through the loop, not both. Both defeats the swivel and puts strain on the hinge of the frame.
And take it off when you are not using it. This is the difference between an accessory and a habit. The eyeglass chain became unwearable partly because people wore it all day, empty, and an empty harness is a sad object. A LA LOOP without glasses in it still works as a necklace, which is exactly the point, but the version of this that looks best is the one that appears when the glasses come off and disappears when they go back on.
It is a small object solving a small problem, and it is one of the few genuinely good pieces of design in an accessory category that mostly does not bother.
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