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Tilda Swinton Crafted Some Sunglasses, Available for Purchase on This Earth

Not yet, but soon.

Tilda wears sunglasses and a white turtleneck.
Tilda Swinton x Gentle Monster.
Photo: Gentle Monster

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Tilda Swinton, who GQ’s Zach Baron once described as smelling of “wildflowers and wood smoke” and who reportedly has an e-mail autoreply that reads "Hello, I am away until 01/01/2070 and am unable to read your message,” is participating in a designer collaboration.

You may not possess a “spectral, almost alien beauty,” nor might you have recently gotten into hot water over being a white film actress playing a character originally written as a Tibetan man and then publicly engaged with Margaret Cho in an email exchange about whitewashing in Hollywood. But soon you can purchase a pair of sunglasses co-created by such a spectral alien and the Korean brand Gentle Monster. You won’t look anything like Tilda Swinton when you put them on, but you’ll have spent at least $250 on the shades, and in making a small contribution to her legacy and annual income, perhaps you’ll feel somewhat closer to her.

The campaign video, online as of yesterday, is prototypically Tilda Swinton: violin music, threatening but somehow placid surroundings, chess played in a mirror, fencing. This reporter doesn’t know that fencing is necessarily a “Tilda Swinton thing,” but it’s as esoteric as sports go so it feels like it should be.

The glasses themselves — the Eye Eye, Trickofthelight, and Newtonic — range in price from $250 to $285 and come in a variety of millennial pink rose, moss, and blood red hues. Also, there are some regular old black and tortoiseshell frames.

According to Gentle Monster, they are “coming soon” on March 1st, 2017.

Newtonic O1, $286
Trickofthelight, $286
Eye Eye, $250