The sighting: Renaissance man Pharrell Williams recently debuted a new pair of sparkling shades during the reveal of his first collection for Louis Vuitton.
The jewels: Pharrell’s spectacular sunnies are by Tiffany & Co. The frames are 18K yellow gold with more than 20 carats of round brilliant and baguette diamonds.
You may remember Pharrell making headlines once before with another pair of bejeweled Tiffany & Co sunglasses. The prior pair debuted at a January 2022 Kenzo show during Paris Fashion Week. That pair was 18k yellow gold with emeralds diamonds, totaling 25+ carats.
Maxwell Stone, a diamond expert from UK retailer Steven Stone estimates that Pharrell’s 2022 diamond sunglasses were likely worth $120,000 and puts the new pair’s value at around $100,000.
What do we think? I try to be open minded in these posts and find the beauty in everything, but sometimes it’s just not possible. Not only are these unrelentingly hideous, but they’re so unflattering that they make Pharrell look like an aging alien with a permanent squint. I love diamonds and I love embellished sunglasses and I’m honestly flabbergasted that someone managed to create a pair of diamond sunglasses that I hate this much.
When Pharrell debuted his first pair of diamond-encrusted sunglasses, he received a lot of criticism for the sunnies’ resemblance to a pair of 17th century Mughal spectacles that went up for at auction at Sotheby’s London in Fall 2021. Critics felt that it was unethical to draw so heavily on an ancient artwork for inspiration without crediting the source.
I have to assume that this new pair of slightly different diamond sunglasses is Pharrell’s attempt to retain the swag factor of wearing diamond sunglasses while distancing himself from the criticism he attracted regarding the first pair’s design inspiration.
Creating a jewel that is a near copy of an ancient design without crediting the original isn’t a great move. But making a minor change to that design that makes the piece unbearably ugly as well as derivative? I think that’s worse.
Judgement: For the first time in Judge The Jewels history, I must give this a 0/10
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