Shady Spex: Vintage Spex for the Rock n Roll Fan
Music and style have always gone hand in hand.
The way I like to think of it is that within the great pool of people who’d consider themselves subcultural, individual tribes exist, each with their own customs, looks, rituals, and concerns. Punks dress in tatters, New Wavers dress like dorks, fashion influencers dress disgusting. For the guitar music fan—the committed and ever-dashing Rock and Roll enthusiast—Shady Spex, born of vintage influence and thoughtful reverence, are likely your best bet for tribally-appropriate optics.
Founded in 2018 by Joey Valentine and Jonathan Toubin, Shady Spex produce Rock and Roll inspired sunglasses with an emphasis on style, quality, and affordability, the latter being of utmost importance. Very often, brands produce items geared after or toward counter-culture, not realizing that every counter-cultural movement to have ever taken place within what the modern consider to be ‘popular culture’ has been born of poverty, which makes their $250 Ramones tour shirt reproduction a bit out of reach for anyone actually and legitimately within the scene. Their devotion to affordability, their preference for small-run/high-quality lines, and their timeless aesthetic set Shady Spex apart. Plus, Debbie Harry, Kid Congo Powers, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Hell, The Gories, Jerrod Carmichael, Gabi Bechtel, and several Bad Seeds, among many others, love them to death, so that’s pretty cool.
We chatted with Shady Spex founders Joey and Jonathan to ask about their origins, their inspirations, and what’s next.
Richard Hell wearing The Richard Hell, shot by Sara Stadtmiller
Jonathan Toubin
How did it start and why?
Ah, shit…
How did it start, why, and when?
Alright, I need to look this up. I think it was 2017, but I’m not sure. Okay, it looks like our first pair of glasses was in February 2018, which means we started talking in 2017. I had this idea for a while. I had been buying dead stock of these Victory sunglasses from 1959, and they were costing me $250 a pop, and I always lose them anyway.
You don’t just grab a pair off the street?
I try to buy glasses on St. Marks, but they never have any good ones. They either look real cheap and have a lot of fake gold on them, or there’s a third-rate Wayfarer. I just thought how cool it’d be to get these classic rock ‘n’ roll shapes for pretty cheap. When I was a young man, I never had any money, and whenever there was something dignified but cheap, it was a real gift, so I wanted to do that for others experiencing the same thing. I had been thinking about it for years, and when I went into Joey’s vintage clothing shop in Asbury Park, NJ, he had these specialized sunglasses for the store that were really cool. We started talking, and it just took off from there.
Did you have music in mind when you were thinking about what sort of Spex you’d be making?
Yeah, kind of. The first thing I had in mind was the New York Night Train. The original ones are my favorite glasses, and I always lose them, so I wanted to make something like that.
Oversized Orange Big City After Dark, shot by Emilina Filippo
What were the originals?
They were these glasses that were famously worn by Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings, and they were way ahead of their time. They were from the 1950s but they looked very modern- a good mix of roundness and angles, but very subtle. Roy Orbison and Lightenin’ Hopkins wore them around then, too. I wanted to have this style available to everybody at a cheap price point. Joey agreed, so we decided to produce them.
Your frames are a bit different, and yet all are still recognizably rock ‘n’ roll.
Yeah, we make each frame our own, but we draw inspiration from that 50s to 70s era of music. My initial idea before online marketplaces got really big was to have a kiosk somewhere, because I loved the idea of having a picture of Andy Warhol wearing this pair of sunglasses, and then us having that pair right there so that you can identify those pairs with an iconic person or someone whose look you like. Not really like pulling an endorsement from a dead person, but trying to show how you could wear it, or identifying the style and look that these glasses go with by showing a person whose style you like would wear them.
Can you talk a bit about the new Richard Hell frames? They are fucking sick.
Richard Hell has such an iconic style that people for generations have been copying, even if they don’t know they’re copying it. We just thought how cool it would be to do a round lens and have it based on Richard’s glasses from the back cover of Blank Generation. Our friend Nick Zinner remastered Richard’s record, and so we thought about reaching out. I didn’t think he’d go for it; I was real embarrassed.
Really? Why?
He’s just really specific about what he does, and I respect him very much for that. I didn’t expect him to want to be involved, but he liked the idea, which blew me away. Developing those glasses took forever because Richard is very meticulous, and he wanted to actually try each prototype on and recreate the ones he had in the 70s. We couldn’t find any to base it on, so we had to keep getting 3D models and samples made. Richard would try them on and add comments, and we’d make adjustments. He insisted that these be really high quality across the board, so these are our first pair of premium glasses. They cost considerably more for the consumer, but that’s because they cost us considerably more to make, and they are personally designed, tested, and approved by Richard.
When do you think this became a brand rather than a few ideas?
I think it just evolved. The first few, we were like, ‘Oh, this is cool. Let’s make one more.’ Manufacturing seemed pretty out of our league. It doesn’t seem like you can have a sunglasses company any more than you can have a shoe company. It’s one thing to screen print some shirts—it’s another thing to make the shirt. At some point, we realized we could do this, and we took off with it. The New York Night Train were a hit right away, and we made our money back pretty quickly, which started our bad habit of putting all the money we make right back into producing the next pair. We didn’t look at it as a business so much as a cool thing we could do, and at some point we realized it’s a business.
So you and Joey Valentine are still running everything yourselves?
Well, I opened TV Eye on January 1st, 2020, and that took up a lot of my time. I was already working more than 40 hours a week DJing and doing my parties, so Joey really picked up the ball, making decisions and doing all the business stuff. We still talk everything out, but Joey’s really been doing the bulk of the work for the last three years. I’ll write product descriptions and marketing, and we will work together on designs, but Joey is really great at making things happen and has taken the business forward.
New York Night Train, shot by Sara Stadtmiller
Joey Valentine
So Jonathan tells me you’re the brains behind this whole operation. How’d that start, and how’s that been?
[laughs] Yeah, I handle the day-to-day operation of Shady Spex. He just came to visit me at my store one day, and he was telling me about his idea for making niche rock ‘n’ roll sunglasses and asked if I knew anyone who could help, and it turned out that I did know some people in manufacturing, and then he goes, ‘Well, how about you?’ I had been wanting to move out of the retail business for a while, and this felt like something fun and creative I could do to make that happen.
You guys are adored by a lot of my favorite artists. Do you reach out to them? Or are you affiliated?
Not really, depends on the frame. What we make is inspired by a frame worn by an artist, so we aren’t affiliated with them, but in the case of Richard Hell, he was very involved. One time I wish we had reached out was when we made frames based on glasses Debbie Harry used to wear. I guess she bought a whole box of them on Canal Street at some junk store, and she doesn’t know what the brand is or anything because nobody really cared back then. Anyway, we made these glasses based on those, and she loved them. She contacted us about them, and we sent her a whole bunch. That was really cool.
How important is music in the business?
It goes hand in hand, absolutely. Especially when you’re talking about Rock and Roll and all of the subgenres related, style is extremely important. We find that when there’s a frame we put out that has less of a music connection, they don’t do as well. We really thrive within that rock ‘n’ roll niche.
You feed the need for people who want to look like what they listen to. Why do you think that music—especially counter-cultural music—and style are so closely tied together?
I don’t know exactly why. It ties into wanting to be a part of a movement, perhaps. I don’t know why certain things fit or get assigned to these forms of music, like, I don’t know why the black leather motorcycle jacket fits so well with the rock ‘n’ roll, Ramones aesthetic, but it’s always interested me.
Why did you choose glasses and not replica shirts or something more obvious like that?
With eyewear, it’s been interesting for me because I grew up in the 80s and 90s when wearing glasses was not great. It was not considered cool. I wasn’t necessarily bullied, but it wasn’t the hippest thing, whereas now, it’s a thing people like. Think about seeing professional ball players at the end of a game putting on fake glasses to look smart. It’s become a whole thing. I worked in an eyewear store in LA, and I would sell prescription frames with blank, plain lenses to people, so it’s becoming a cool thing. But on top of that, in rock ‘n’ roll specifically, so many icons wore prescription lenses—usually blacked out—I think starting most notably with Roy Orbison. That guy had really bad sight.
Blind as a bat?
I don’t know if he was legally blind, but you could see photos of him with these really thick coke bottle glasses. The Richard Hell frames we are recreating are his prescription sunglasses that he would wear at night and on stage or at the club so that he’d look cool and could see. Joey Ramone always wore glasses and people would ask if they were prescription, and he’d skirt around the issue. It’s just funny how prescription glasses aren’t or weren’t ‘cool,’ but so many rock ‘n’ roll icons wore them. Oh, Michael Hutchence from INXS, he wore prescriptions and had terrible stage fright, so when he’d go on stage, he’d take them off so he couldn’t see the audience. Glasses have a very big, special place in rock ‘n’ roll culture and history.
Don’t be a poser. Get your pair here.