Dôen and Garrett Leight Team Up on Vintage-Inspired Sunglasses Capsule

Picture sunglasses "perched just so" on a French New Wave actress, circa 1968 — that was the starting image for Dôen co-founders Margaret and Katherine Kleveland when they conceived the brand's first foray into eyewear. The result, a limited-edition capsule made in collaboration with Garrett Leight California Optical, the brand created in 2010 dedicated to classic designs combining craftsmanship with timeless aesthetics, landed on March 24, 2026, and it is exactly as romantic as you'd expect from the duo behind Dôen's flutter-sleeved dresses and sun-faded florals.

"Dôen has always felt like a kindred spirit to me — there's a softness, a romance and a real authenticity in everything they do that resonates deeply with the GLCO world," said Garrett Leight, founder and CEO of GLCO. "We both draw so much from California — its light, its history, its sense of ease — so this collaboration came together in a really organic way."

The capsule includes two cat-eye inspired silhouettes, each offered in three colorways. The Doyenne is slightly oversized with a subtle lift at the outer corners, available in Black, Tortoise, and Mink, which reads like a faded orange. The Ingénue is a classic take on the cat-eye with rounded edges, offered in Black, Tortoise (listed as Ember Tortoise on the brand's site) and Lipstick, a shade similar to dark red.

Those names alone deserve a moment. Doyenne and Ingénue aren't random product codes — they are character types, archetypes from classic cinema. The Kleveland sisters have said they "kept thinking about the women who inspire us again and again, the French songbirds and silver-screen starlets of the '60s and '70s who always seemed to have a pair of sunglasses perched just so." That specificity of vision is what separates this from a generic licensed eyewear play. Margaret and Katherine visited the Garrett Leight team in Los Angeles themselves, working directly on each frame design and color selection, and have been wearing their samples ever since the project wrapped.

Each frame retails for $425 and is available at shopdoen.com and garrettleight.com as well as Dôen and Garrett Leight stores. At that price, the Doyenne and Ingénue sit squarely within Garrett Leight's premium acetate range and are justified by the construction: both styles are made in Japan from lightweight acetate with 100 percent UV protection. Japanese acetate manufacturing at this price point is the benchmark for independent eyewear — it's the same standard that anchors Garrett Leight's core collection and puts these well above fast-fashion sunglass territory.

The campaign imagery matches the frames' mood exactly. Shot in Sicily, it starred actress and poet Greta Rosanna Bellamacina, photographed alongside her children by her husband — a genuinely familial production that mirrors the ease and warmth Dôen builds into every collection. The brand also released a companion playlist, "By the Seaside," curated around vintage French pop, and a film list anchored by Jacques Deray's 1969 sun-soaked thriller "La Piscine," in case you need help getting into character.

The Ingénue's Lipstick colorway, in particular, is the one to reach for first. Dark red acetate with a rounded cat-eye front is the kind of frame that photographs well at any latitude and pairs with the Dôen wardrobe these sunglasses were literally designed to complement.