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MYKITA began in a Berlin kindergarten and now engineers its own frames: the screwless spiral hinge, 3D-printed MYLON and a cult following built on precision.
Pick up a pair of MYKITA sunglasses and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No screws at the temple. No welded joint at the rim. No logo stamped across the arm to tell you what you are holding. Instead, you get a strip of stainless steel half a millimetre thick, bent rather than soldered into shape, and a small coiled hinge sitting out in the open where every other maker hides its hardware. That hinge is the whole argument. MYKITA works on the principle that the technical solution has to be the aesthetic one as well, and the spiral hinge is where the two meet.
MYKITA is a Berlin house, and the way it tells its own origin explains a good deal about the product. In 2003, four founders from Oldenburg, among them Moritz Krueger, took over a disused children's day care centre in the city and started making eyewear in it. A day care centre is a Kita in German, so My + Kita gave them a name, and the building gave them a temperament: curiosity, play, a tolerance for getting things wrong on the way to getting them right. Krueger has run the company as creative director since his three co-founders stepped away in 2015.
The in-house manufactory was not a philosophy at the outset. It was a shortage. The founders drew frames that no established supplier would or could produce, the spiral hinge chief among them, so they built the tools and worked out the processes themselves. Developing its own machinery to meet a design requirement has since become the way the company operates, and its single greatest asset. Berlin in the early 2000s rewarded exactly that instinct, a city where an empty room and whatever furniture you could carry in counted as a business plan.
Everything still happens under one roof. After a spell on Brunnenstraße in Mitte, MYKITA moved in 2014 into the MYKITA HAUS, a heritage-listed classicist building on Ritterstraße in Kreuzberg, where design, engineering, production, research and marketing share the same floors. Frames are cut, formed, finished and hand-assembled there, then shipped from there. For a brand of this reach, vertical integration is unusual, and it is deliberate: MYKITA has stayed independent, resisting the licensing deals and conglomerate ownership that account for most of the eyewear on the market.
The material palette is narrow and each part of it has been reworked.
The stainless steel is medical-grade spring steel, sourced from the Swedish producer Alleima and made up of 95 per cent recycled content, with 5 per cent raw material added to reach the quality the frames demand. It is what allows the NO1 collection to be as thin and as flexible as it is, and it is where the spiral hinge lives, patented, screwless, adhesive-free and endlessly imitated.
The acetate is Acetate Renew, from Eastman. MYKITA was the first eyewear company to switch its entire acetate supply over to it, and did so without softening the depth of colour or the hand feel that make acetate worth using in the first place.
Then there is MYLON, which is the outlier. It is a proprietary polyamide powder fused into solid form by selective laser sintering, which is to say the frames are 3D printed rather than cut from stock. It won MYKITA an iF material award and created a category in eyewear that did not previously exist: frames that are close to weightless, structurally sound in shapes that milling could not deliver, and produced with almost no waste. If you have ever picked up a MYLON shield and briefly wondered whether you were holding anything at all, that is the material doing its work.
The range runs wider than the engineering story suggests. Aviators, the vintage butterfly, rounds, squares, panto, rimless and the oversized sun shield, in masculine, feminine and unisex fits, across the sun and optical lines. The collections divide by intent rather than by season: NO1 for the stainless steel classics, LITE for the barely-there builds, LESSRIM for the rimless, DECADES for the archival silhouettes, MYLON for the printed frames, STUDIO for the sharper fashion propositions, and POLARIZED PRO for the lenses that earn their keep on water and snow.
The collaborations are where the house lets itself off the leash. Bernhard Willhelm brought the eighties back in colour blocks. Helmut Lang arrived in 2019, with HL001 and HL002 developed alongside the label's Mark Thomas, taking the wraparound sun shield apart and rebuilding it from four separate lenses in neon pink and yellow. Maison Margiela and Martine Rose followed, both trading in the nineties shapes that have since become the brand's most photographed. The current roster reaches beyond fashion entirely, to RIMOWA, OAMC, the Berlin magazine 032c, Leica and Monocle, which is to say to the other design-obsessed independents MYKITA recognises as its own.
There is a version of luxury eyewear that sells you a name on a temple arm and a frame made under licence by somebody else entirely. MYKITA sells the opposite, and does so without putting its name anywhere you can see it. The construction is the branding. You can look at twenty pairs and find twenty different resolutions of the same problem, which is what happens when a company owns every stage between the sketch and the box and keeps asking whether the thing could be built better.
Twenty-three years on from a room full of small chairs in a disused Kita, the answer is still usually yes.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.