The founder

Lars von Bennigsen

A man who spent a decade dressing people and then decided the more interesting question was how they see.

Temperley

In 2000, Lars and the designer Alice Temperley founded Temperley London, the Somerset-born fashion house whose dresses became a fixture of British style. The division of labor was the classic one: she was the creative vision, he built and ran the business. They married in 2002, in a Twenties-style wedding that Vogue covered, and had a son in 2008. Lars was the company's chief executive until 2013, after the two separated in 2012. Thirteen years at the helm of a fashion house teaches you something the eyewear industry mostly forgets: that an object you put on your body is a feeling first and a product second.

Loving Victorious Beings

LVB began from one refusal, which the brand still states plainly: that eyewear should not be neutral and darkening reality, but enhance our lives. Lars built the company, in his words, from scientists, artisans and lovers of life. The lenses were developed over more than a decade. The frames are cut by hand from Mazzucchelli 1849 acetate in Treviso, the original birthplace of Italian eyewear, by small partners rather than big factories. Every pair plants a tree in Brazil. The Mayan frame was made for the Mayan Warrior community at Burning Man. The glasses have been stocked at ABC Home in New York, at Cuixmala and Hacienda de San Antonio in Mexico, at Six Senses in Ibiza and at Sanara in Tulum.

The company's stated purpose is modest and strange at once: to enhance the mood and wellbeing of its customers in natural and non-addictive ways. Lars describes the brand as a merger of wellness, science and style. The press that followed, from Vogue and Grazia to The Times and The Daily Telegraph, mostly reached for the same word: mood.

Lars is my dear friend. I have put on his lenses and watched a grey afternoon turn into a sunset, and I have watched him light up explaining why. I am honored to be an advisor to Loving Victorious Beings, and I built this world so that you can have the experience before the pair arrives. Dr. Star Heartsong

What a fan notices

The company does the unfashionable things well. Lenses swap at home with no tools. The money-back guarantee is thirty days, with no argument. The FAQ tells you not to drive in them and to keep wear to about half an hour a day, which is not what a company chasing volume would print. The frames are engraved with a phoenix and the Noble Path symbol, a Buddhist eightfold frame for clarity, intention and ethical alignment. The whole thing reads as a person's taste rather than a category's rules, and that person is Lars.