4040 Foldable Rimless Sunglasses — Silver

Chanel's eyewear under Karl Lagerfeld is where the house's most inventive engineering lived, and this folding rimless frame from S/S 2000 is a perfect example. It captures the turn-of-the-millennium mood — futurist, minimal, technical — while keeping the interlocking CC at the centre of the design rather than on the side of it.

A continuous silver-tone metal wire runs from lens to temple with no rim at all, and the polished interlocking-CC bridge doubles as the folding mechanism, so the frame collapses at the centre into something small enough to slip into a pocket. Cool blue-grey gradient lenses. Lightweight and precise throughout. Made in Italy.

It is a collector's frame rather than a basic pair of shades — a piece of Lagerfeld-era Chanel that speaks directly to people who know what the folding CC bridge means. Clean silver examples are increasingly hard to find, and it is the kind of quietly technical archive piece that only gets rarer. One size.