AKILA

AKILA was founded in 2014 in Los Angeles by John Tom and Patrick Tom as a contemporary luxury eyewear brand specifically focused on what the founders described as 'a deliberately-architectural, deliberately-art-meets-eyewear vocabulary anchored to small-batch Japanese-acetate construction.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2014 LA-anchored contemporary-luxury-eyewear brands. The AKILA vocabulary settled around several specific products: hand-finished Japanese-acetate frames with deliberately-architectural proportions, the brand's iconic Logos sunglasses (a wraparound-acetate design that has been the brand's defining product since 2017), the Apollo aviator-style programme, the iconic Eros geometric-frame programme, various deliberately-experimental fashion-week-aesthetic eyewear collaborations, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black acetate, oxblood-acetate, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated transparent-acetate colours including electric-blue, marigold-yellow, and washed-rose. Production is entirely in Japan at small Sabae-region acetate-eyewear workshops. The brand is independent and held by the Tom brothers. AKILA operates a flagship retail concept in Los Angeles (Fairfax Avenue — the brand's home flagship), plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, the Webster, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-eyewear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the most quietly successful post-2014 LA-anchored 'architectural-luxury-eyewear' brands, with the deliberately-Japanese-acetate construction positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary 'eyewear-luxury' conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2015.