The Vintage Wall
The Archive · Basant Lok
The Vintage Wall
Original frames from the nineties and early two-thousands. Original hardware. Tinted by hand, in-house, to depths that were never catalogue options. One of each — and when it goes, it is gone.
We stopped letting go of things somewhere in the late nineties. A frame would arrive that was extraordinary — a shape nobody was making, an acetate nobody was pouring — and once the moulds were gone there was no replacing it. Those pieces went onto a wall instead of into a drawer. Three decades later the wall is the reason a certain kind of collector comes to Vasant Vihar specifically.
The Ledger
Accessioned pieces
Each piece carries an accession number in the form OP / year / sequence — the year it entered the archive, not the year it was made.
| No. | House | Frame | Bespoke tint | Era |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OP/94/01 | Cartier | 18k gold-plated aviator | Amber gradient | c. 1994 |
| OP/98/02 | Persol | Meflecto acetate | Smoke-to-rose fade | c. 1998 |
| OP/91/03 | Ray-Ban B&L | Bausch & Lomb Wayfarer | G-15 deep forest | c. 1991 |
| OP/00/04 | Henry Jullien | Hand-engraved silver | Cognac gradient | c. 2000 |
| OP/96/05 | Christian Dior | Oversized Optyl | Violet wash | c. 1996 |
| OP/99/06 | Yves Saint Laurent | Gilt round | Tea-green fade | c. 1999 |
The tints are ours
Almost every piece on the wall has been re-tinted in-house. Not because the originals were wrong, but because a thirty-year-old lens is usually the part that has aged — and because a gradient mixed by hand to a depth you have chosen is the whole point.
We will do the same on a frame you already own, vintage or not, prescription or plano. More on lenses and tints →
Come and see it
The wall does not photograph well — the tints shift with the light, which is rather the point. It is at the Basant Lok boutique, open daily.
11:00 – 21:00 · +91 98990 16027 · Directions