Halston Frames?

[Browman]

Have a patient who came in with a pair of his own frames that he purchased at JC Penney back in the 1990s. They're in exceptional shape, especially as the patient says they've been his only frames for the past 21 years. They're on their last legs, and he's hoping that I can either track down some deadstock/NOS to replace them. Any idea who manufactured them? My gut instinct is that they were an in-house brand for Penney's back in the day, but, anyone know who they used? Was it March/Lux/etc. or someone lost to time? Pretty curious now myself.

[AngeHamm]

I'm torn between admiring you for trying to track this down and being horrified at the precedent you're setting for this patient. Finding a 25-year-old deadstock frame is not a reasonable expectation.

That said, I am curious as hell to know if you can find this.

[Browman]

I'll have to admit, part of the motivation is the challenge. If someone had come in asking for a five-ish year old frame my kneejerk reaction would've been to try and get them into something new, but 1) The patient's devotion to this model and 2) The sheer age of it have me intrigued. I prepped the patient up front that this was a difficult task and encouraged him to begin exploring new options (and even recommended him a few pairs that fall into his aesthetic and RX parameters), but I'm also that person in my circle of friends who always knows how/where to find exactly what someone is looking for; so I'm curious to see if I can pull this off.

[Lelarep]

I can make three possibly helpful suggestions.

1) Take a pic of the frame from an angle that a stock image for it might have been presented. Take that pic and put it into TinEye: https://www.tineye.com/ . It is a reverse image search, and it is rather accurate. If there is an image of it somewhere out there on the current web, it should find it.

2) If you're fairly good with computers, you can take the same pic and run it through the Internet Archive reverse image search API: https://archive.readme.io/docs/reverse-image-search-api . This will search for images that have been archived all the way back to the mid 90's (I think 1996?). You might get lucky.

3. You could use the Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ to try and access an archival copy of the JC Penny website from the mid-late 90's. The information might be in there somewhere.

If that all fails, I have the foggiest.

[drk]

Wow. Lelarep must work for the CIA. Good show!