The short answer to this question is yes; but a better answer considers value through design work and scarcity rather than just quality, and whether you actually want to wear slightly flashier sunglasses. 

Let’s start with quality. With eyewear, quality comes down to a handful of things: acetate, hinges, the way the hinges are attached, smooth finishing and lenses. 

Most people use the same acetate suppliers (Mazzuccheli, Takiron), same hinges (OBE) and run the pins all the way through the arms (so they can be repaired and replaced). Some of these, like the hinges, are easy details to watch out for. Finishing and in-store fitting are more subtle. 

But a lot of the time, cheap sunglasses just feel cheap – mostly the use of less expensive acetates, which make them seem flimsy and brittle. A pair of glasses from a high-street brand can feel as if it’s just waiting to be snapped in half.

This is one of the slightly misleading things about Jacques Marie Mage (JMM) glasses. Because they use noticeably thicker frames, people talk about how substantial and well made they feel. But it’s just more acetate. 

Still, JMM ticks all of those quality points, and adds niche ones like developing its own hinges. These are very well-made glasses, unlike designer brands you might pick up in your local optician, many of which are famously made by one company, Luxottica. 

However, the JMM glasses I have been wearing the past few months – the Zephirin in Tokyo colour, pictured above – were £830. What can justify that price?

Well, partly a few things you don’t want to pay for. When we visited the JMM store in Hollywood in the spring, most of it was taken up by a massive distressed-metal horse leaping over half of a similarly distressed-metal car. There was a velvet rope and a waiting area. 

The glasses themselves also come with a lot of packaging – all beautiful, and more tasteful than the horse, but it is the kind of thing you keep on top of a shelf for a while, just because you feel you paid for it. 

Part of the price does account for some things that elevate JMM glasses and make them genuinely special, however.

The way you usually make money in sunglasses is to make one or two popular styles and then mass produce them for years. The worst way to do it is to make lots and lots of designs, all interesting in different ways, and make many of them in limited editions. 

This is the JMM business model. And while you may say it’s just another money-making strategy – because it creates hype that means everyone wants the limited pairs and will overpay for them – it’s definitely the harder way to do it. The glasses have to be genuinely desirable.

The frames themselves also include lots of details that make them complicated, unusual and time-consuming to make. Perhaps unnecessarily so. 

On mine, for example, the arms are made of two layers of acetate – a tortoiseshell one and a clear one – that makes the arms a subtly brighter, more translucent colour than the fronts. It also enables them to have a clear section that wraps around the ears, but makes the arm look more like a straight line. 

There are several of these details, all small and perhaps, as I said, unnecessary. But you can’t argue they’re not putting the work into the product. 

Design-wise, the frames are also consistently interesting. I spoke to a couple of friends and vintage collectors in eyewear, and they all had reservations about the brand, but also all praised the sophistication of the designs. 

As one of them put it: “It’s not easy to create so many designs that relate to classic pieces, but also all have real personality of their own.” 

The problem with the designs is, for me, that they’re often quite bold and for that reason don’t suit many people. The frames are thick, often oversized, and sometimes come with eye-catching details on the arms. 

When I visited the London store (which I should say, is nicer than LA and has some very knowledgeable staff) there were only two frames that really worked for me, and this Zephirin was easily the best.  

Whether you like the brand or not, this will probably be the biggest stumbling block for most readers, given their natural tendency towards understated style. 

The dramatic designs also create another problem – the kind of person that wears JMM. 

Basile Khadiry, who runs the Beige store in Paris, was an early exponent of JMM. But he stopped carrying them after a while, saying in a recent interview with us: “They’re well made, but they became something flashy, worn by a certain kind of person.”

Because the glasses are a bit flashy they attract people who dress that way – and also, I find, those who collect glasses, and watches, who want a new pair every season and want them as a form of status symbol*.

It probably reveals how much of a snob I am, but this is honestly my biggest problem with JMM – not the price or the shops, but the association with someone that consumes fashion in a much more ostentatious and hype-driven way than I do. 

Since I’ve been wearing my Zephirin pair on Permanent Style, a lot of people have asked what I think of them – are they any good?

The answer is yes, they are good, and actually not bad value given all the things that go into them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re for you, exciting as they may seem. 

I really like my pair, but there was no other model that suited me, and they wouldn’t be the first pair of sunglasses I’d buy. I’d always get a more classic pair first, and I’m always going to wear them more. 

My JMMs are a nice way to add a little bit of interest to an outfit when I feel it needs it – to push it a little flashier on the fuddy-flashy scale, perhaps. In the same way as you’d add pattern or a pop of colour to an outfit that’s otherwise quite plain. 

I also wouldn’t rule out getting another pair – if there’s another design that really suits me – because I genuinely enjoy and value them. But I know they’ll never be my default; it’s just not my style. 

*There’s an interesting side topic here about why sunglasses have become such a collectable item. It might be because watches are a little played out, or perhaps because outfits today are otherwise quite plain and tonal.