Kaleos. The Bauhaus twist
(Next Saturday October 1st we will hold a Kaleos showroom in El Graduat from 10am to 8pm. There you will find the new collection of frames and sunglasses with special purchase conditions, giveaways and more surprises.)
A year before opening the optic shop, we wrote a list on a blank sheet of paper to imagine what El Graduat, which was not yet called El Graduat, should look like. One of the first items we jot down was "KM 0".
The optic would be located in front of the Mercat de la Llibertat and a market had its raison d'etre in selling local, local and seasonal goods. Its rationality, the Mediterranean market, was already sustainable and ecological before the Roman Empire. We embraced this logic without reservations and Kaleos is its most distinctive testimony.
From Barcelona to the world
In the initial survey, Kaleos easily stood out among Barcelona’s frames. It quickly became one of our must-haves, almost effortlessly. Defining them is not easy. With barely seven years of life, Kaleos has been able to conceive and produce a very particular, eclectic and iconic collection. They opt for almost cinematic mounts, always elegant and indebted to the avant-gardes of the early 20th century.
Perhaps most striking is how Kaleos establishes an absolutely univocal and consistent identity, despite the huge variations from model to model. It is, in any case, an exquisite tension between identity and otherness that always takes us by surprise when we receive its new collections.
It is amazing to behold how they evolve each model every six months and it is not surprising that Kaleos is more and more present in the saturated world of frames. They already have a greater presence everywhere on their own merits.
Shape twist
The inspiration for the identity of Kaleos must be sought in the Avant Gardes of the beginning of the century. Especially in the Bauhaus school and the Ulm school (but also the Blaue Reiter, Modern Architecture and the International Style).
The Bauhaus was a school of art and architecture in Germany that was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar (Germany) during the Weimar Republic, and was closed by the Prussian authorities (in the hands of the Nazi party) in 1933. The case of the Bauhaus is paradigmatic. They introduced art, design and craftsmanship into industrial mass production. The result was a new aesthetic, based on geometric principles where “form follows function”, in the words of one of the founders, the architect Walter Gropius.
Kaleos. Classic and revolutionary
In this sense, Kaleos investigates the shape of the entire mount, starting from geometric principles. It takes up the strategies of the Bauhaus, claiming a revolutionary modernity, which has been assumed, if not forgotten, as design classics. In some cases it even recovers some elegant and very harmonious colors, which now collide and give them a very defined personality.
You can trace this clean, geometric and iconic profile to all styles of glasses: panthos, cat eyes, butterfly, square, round, wayfarer. All types of glasses can dialogue with these principles and the results are unexpected and magical.
Next Saturday, October 1st, we will hold a Kaleos showroom in El Graduat from 10am to 8pm. There you will find the new collection of frames and sunglasses where you’ll be able to meet all this influences first hand. Come to check them out, It’ll be worth it.
Until next time!
