There is a particular kind of energy in the boutique on a trunk show morning. The trays come out, the cases open, and suddenly there are hundreds of frames on the floor that live in this room exactly once a year. Champagne-tinted acetates. Paper-thin titanium. A whole wall of a single house’s vision for the season, all at once.
A trunk show is the closest thing our industry has to a runway moment, and we host several every year at Style Site Optical in Aventura. If you have never been to one, here is what actually happens — and why our clients block out the date.
So What Exactly Is a Trunk Show?
A trunk show is a one-day event where a brand’s own representative comes to us and brings the entire collection with them. Not a curated slice of it. The full seasonal release, plus that brand’s top-selling frames from across the country — the styles that are moving in New York and Los Angeles and Miami right now.
The reason this matters comes down to something unglamorous: shelf space. Every optical boutique in the world, ours included, has to make choices. We carry the frames we believe in and the ones we know our clients reach for. But a house like Fendi or Tom Ford might release far more in a season than any single shop can physically display.
A trunk show removes that limit for a day. Here is what changes:
- You see the whole collection. Every shape, every colourway, including the pieces we do not normally stock.
- You get the national bestsellers. The rep brings what is performing everywhere, not just what performs here.
- You can order anything you try. Fall in love with a frame that is not part of our regular range? We write it up that day.
- The expert is in the room. Someone who knows the collection at the hinge-and-rivet level is standing next to you.
“At a trunk show you see the brand’s full collection, not just what fits on our shelves. If you’ve been waiting for a certain frame, that’s the day to come in.”
Why Our Clients Keep These Dates Free
We could have kept trunk shows as a quiet appointment-only affair. Instead we decided to make them an event for our clients — because the difference between buying glasses and choosing glasses turns out to be mostly about atmosphere and information.
Raffles, Giveaways and a Little Theatre
Every trunk show includes raffles with genuinely excellent prizes and giveaways throughout the day. It is a party as much as it is a fitting. People come with a friend, take their time, try on things they would never have pulled off the shelf themselves, and generally leave with a frame they are far more excited about than the one they walked in imagining.
The People Who Actually Know the Frames
This is the part that surprises first-timers. The brand representatives are not salespeople reading from a card. They know why a particular Bvlgari temple is set with that stone, why a MODO frame weighs what it weighs, which Carolina Herrera shape was drawn for a narrower bridge.
Ask them about the history of the house. Ask why one frame is Japanese titanium and another is Italian acetate, and what that means for how it will feel on your face in August. That kind of conversation is very hard to have any other day of the year.
Most people arrive thinking a trunk show is about seeing more frames. They leave realising it was about finally understanding the ones they were looking at.
Our Trunk Show Calendar
We run our shows in two main seasons, spring and fall, plus a smaller one to close out the year. The spring pairing stays consistent. The fall line-up rotates, which is how we keep introducing our clients to houses they have not worn before.
Every March: Tom Ford and MODO
Our March show pairs two houses that could not be more different — which is exactly why it works.
Tom Ford is pure, unapologetic glamour. Ford joined Gucci in 1990 and served as its creative director from 1994 until 2004, a run credited with pulling the house back from the brink and rebuilding it into a powerhouse. When he launched his own label in the mid-2000s, eyewear was among the very first categories he put his name to — which tells you how central he considered it. The signature is instantly legible: strong, architectural shapes, deep tortoise and black acetates, and that polished metal “T” at the temple.
MODO comes at eyewear from the opposite direction. Founded in 1990 in Soho by Alessandro Lanaro, the brand built its reputation on frames so light you genuinely stop noticing them — the paper-thin titanium collections are the ones people pick up and then look at twice, convinced something is missing. The design language is quiet, clean and modern.
MODO also runs the “Buy a Frame, Help a Child See” programme with the NGO Seva, which has screened and treated hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world. It is a rare thing to be able to hand someone a pair of glasses and tell them the purchase did something useful elsewhere.
Fall: Carolina Herrera, Marc Jacobs, and Two Debuts
Last fall we hosted Carolina Herrera, Marc Jacobs, Saint Laurent and Gucci. This year Herrera and Jacobs return, and we are introducing two houses to our trunk show floor for the first time.
Carolina Herrera built her house in New York in 1980, showing her first full collection the following spring, and spent four decades making the case for polish over noise. Wes Gordon has led the design since 2018 and has pushed the colour palette somewhere brighter without losing the discipline. The eyewear follows the clothes: refined shapes, considered proportions, and detailing you notice on second glance rather than first.
Marc Jacobs is the other side of American fashion entirely. Jacobs designed his first collection under his own name in 1986 and went on to spend seventeen years as creative director of Louis Vuitton, from 1997 to 2014, where he built the house’s first ready-to-wear line. His signature is that unmistakable mash-up of preppy, grunge and couture — and the eyewear carries it, with bold colour, playful hardware and shapes that have a sense of humour about themselves.
Fendi joins us for the first time this fall. Founded in Rome in 1925 by Adele and Edoardo Fendi as a fur and leather workshop, it is one of the great Roman houses — and one that has never been shy. Karl Lagerfeld’s decades there produced the double-F that everyone can draw from memory, and today’s eyewear is where that Roman confidence gets loud: oversized butterflies, crystal-set rimless constructions, sculptural acetates. If you have been curious about Fendi and never had a reason to try a pair, this is the day.
Bvlgari also debuts this fall, and it brings something none of the others do — it is a jeweller first. Sotirios Voulgaris, a Greek silversmith, opened the business in Rome in 1884, and the house has been designing for the human body in precious metal ever since. The Serpenti motif that emerged in the 1960s remains its signature, and the eyewear is genuinely jewellery-adjacent: metalwork, stone-set temples, and a level of finishing that reads differently in the hand than it does in a photograph.
Fendi and Bvlgari take the two slots Gucci and Saint Laurent held last year. Both of those houses remain part of our permanent collection — this is about giving our clients something new to discover.
December: An Evening with Miu Miu
We close the year with something deliberately smaller — a single-brand show, more intimate, easier to linger over. This December it is Miu Miu.
Miuccia Prada launched Miu Miu in 1993, naming it after her own family nickname, and built it as the younger, more mischievous counterpart to Prada. That spirit runs straight through the eyewear: sharp cat-eyes, unexpected colour, frames that are having considerably more fun than their price tag suggests. It is a good note to end a year on.
How to Get on the Invitation List
Trunk show dates are set a few months out and we release them to our clients first. The most reliable ways to hear about the next one:
- Follow us on social media — dates, brand announcements and prize reveals go out there first.
- Join our newsletter so the invitation lands in your inbox.
- Mention it at your next visit. Tell us which house you are interested in and we will make sure you hear when that show is scheduled.
And if you would rather not wait, you can always browse our designer collection online or come see us in the boutique. We are happy to talk frames on an ordinary Tuesday too.
Trunk shows are the one day a year you get to meet a house properly — its history, its craft, and every single thing it made this season — with the people who know it best standing beside you. Come see what all the noise is about.
Ask us about the next Style Site Optical trunk show in Aventura
