ALTINA - ARTnews 'Google Doodle Honors Harlequin Frame Inventor Altina Schinasi on Her 116th Birthday'

ARTnews | August 4, 2023

Google celebrated the 116th birthday on Friday of sculptor, documentary filmmaker, and inventor Altina Schinasi with a pair of orange cat’s-eye glasses framing the company logo.

After noticing the lack of options for women’s glasses, she invented the harlequin shape, or cat’s-eye, glasses for which she is probably most known. One shop owner took to her creation and grabbed the rights to the frames for six months, leading to her design’s huge success as a must-have fashion accessory among American women in the late 1930s and ’40s.

Schinasi was the subject of the biopic Altina (2013) and penned a memoir The Road I Have Traveled (1995).

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