Zoë de Pass Eyewear

It started with a remark about how she looked

Somebody once told Zoë de Pass that she looked like a mum, and did not mean it kindly. She was on maternity leave at the time, having spent five or six years as head of insights at a London fashion agency doing trend research, so she did what a trend researcher does and looked the phrase up. Everything she found was unkind, including an article headlined "Why I'll never dress like a mum," whose author has since apologised to her. She started an Instagram account under the offending phrase in 2015 and set about turning it inside out.

The sunglasses came later, and are the product of fifteen years across design, branding and product development, not a licensing deal with a name attached. Frames are handmade from eco acetate, a plant-based material made from wood pulp instead of petroleum and produced without chemical plasticisers. Several of the colours were formulated specifically for her, on the grounds that if you are going to make the case for a better material you should not then have to compromise on the exact shade of chartreuse.

The shapes are named like people, which is either charming or faintly unnerving depending on your mood: Kate, Billie, Grace, Lauryn. They come in colours most eyewear brands would treat as a misprint, and are built to be kept rather than lost twice a summer. She works out of Brighton these days, having come down from Peckham, and when not designing sunglasses she runs women-only ski trips, which tells you roughly everything.

She sits among our other British makers, which is where to go if you like knowing whose idea a thing was. Have a browse