Lynn Simmons

Designer Profile

Lynn Simmons founded her company, eyestyle, after an extensive background in the optical industry. That starting point matters for a sunwear designer: the optical trade teaches fit, lens quality, frame construction and the realities of how eyewear is sold through professional channels, and a designer who comes up through it designs sunglasses that work as optical products as well as fashion pieces. Onto that technical base she brought a sharp eye for innovative fashion concepts, the combination her company was built on.

Within The Skyline Studios – Apparel Search Design Studio, she served as a Guest Editor, one of the outside specialists whose profiles the studio presented alongside its own team. Guest specialists extend a general design consultancy into fields that need their own expertise, and eyewear is a clear case: frame design, lens specification and optical distribution each follow rules that general fashion design does not teach, so a studio serving fashion brands benefits from a named eyewear specialist in its circle.

eyestyle and Sunwear Design

Through eyestyle, Lynn Simmons collaborated with Trina Turk and other fashion notables to design and produce quality sunwear collections. A fashion label’s sunwear line has to translate the label’s clothing identity into frames: its colors, its hardware language and its customer’s idea of glamour all have to survive the move from a dress to an object a few inches wide that sits on the face. Designing and producing those collections, rather than only sketching them, means carrying the translation through materials, factories and finished quality.

Sunwear also runs on a different calendar and channel from clothing. Collections are planned around bright seasons and holiday travel as much as around fashion weeks, and the same frame may be sold by a fashion boutique, a sunglass specialty store and an optical practice, each expecting different packaging, pricing support and replenishment. A designer-producer who understands both the fashion collaboration and the optical trade can build a collection that fits all three shelves instead of fitting one and straining in the others.

Licensing, Distribution and Vintage Work

Alongside the design work, she partnered with key distributors for licensed sales opportunities within the optical trade. Licensing is how many fashion names reach the optical market: the label licenses its name, a specialist designs and produces the eyewear, and distributors place it with the practices and chains that sell frames every day. Holding the design role and the distributor relationships in one company lets a licensed program move from signature to store shelf without the design intent being handed off and diluted between companies.

Vintage looks were her forte. She designed special sunwear for rock bands, consulted for TV shows and customized sunwear looks for the runway. Those three commissions share one skill: reading a period or a persona and expressing it in a frame shape, a lens tint and a finish. A band’s stage eyewear has to read from a distance and survive a tour; a TV consultant has to keep eyewear true to a character and a period across a production; a runway look has to complete a designer’s outfit in the seconds it is photographed. Vintage fluency serves all three, because so much of sunwear style is the revival and adjustment of earlier frame shapes.

Website and Current Status

The website of record for eyestyle was www.Lynneyestyle.com, carried in the References list below exactly as documented. When checked in October 2026 the domain served a parked-domain page rather than a business site, and no current independent source confirming her present-day activity was found. Readers should therefore treat the collaborations, specialties and services described on this page as the documented record of her work as it was presented at the time, and confirm current availability through the studio hub before relying on them.