For the next few months we’re going to get into the heads of the brilliant eyewear designers of the edCFDA in order for you to perhaps better understand how their passions for life inspire their eyewear and sunwear creations. With open-ended sentences as provided by the editors of 20/20, eyewear designers deliver the stories and the anecdotes inspiring their creations. With this debut salvo 20/20 presents venerated Artist of the Frame Blake Kuwahara with the beginnings of some simple sentences as we let his imagination and his lifestyle complete the thought.


I LOVE VISITING… flea markets. I got hooked on them when I was in optometry school in Berkeley, and what initially was a distraction from the rigors of academia quickly turned into an obsession. I troll flea markets whenever I travel, on the look for nothing in particular other than finding a treasure that has a soulfulness and a story to tell.

THERE’S THIS PAINTING… that I picked up at a flea market in Budapest that surprisingly had a modern take of the same subject hidden on the back. I only wish there was a way to display both sides at the same time.

I CAN’T WAIT FOR… the time when I can take my niece and nephew with me to Japan. They’re already keenly aware of street fashion, and there’s no better place than Tokyo for that. I also want them to experience their cultural heritage and the vestiges of what’s left of “old Japan.”




MY FAVORITE TIME OF… the day is dawn when the sun breaks through my bedroom window. Looking at the bay in the morning light is not a bad way to start the day.

I ONCE SAW A MOVIE (“TOUR DE FORCE”) THAT… made me cry so hard, I wanted to hide. But, I was on a plane…


THE ODDEST FOOD I EVER ATE WAS… this green, non-descript fruit that was shaped like an alien. I just kept wondering “why?”


IF I HAD A TIME MACHINE I’D… go back to the time when my maternal grandfather was alive. An elegant man who cut a James Bond-like figure mysteriously worked for the U.S. government and lived a diplomat’s life with my grandmother all over the world—Bangkok, Saigon, Bolivia, Jakarta and Yemen to name a few. He had so many stories to tell, and we only began to scratch the surface.