Most sunglasses get two lenses. That’s the standard, the baseline, the thing nobody questions because why would you? Two lenses. Two eyes. Done. But Issey Miyake Eyes just released UROKO, a pair of sunglasses with eight lenses, and it made me stop and genuinely reconsider what we accept as default in design.
UROKO is part of the IM MEN Spring Summer 2026 collection, titled “Dancing Texture,” and the name alone tells you this isn’t a collection built on safe choices. The eight-lens design draws inspiration from the ceramic works of Shoji Kamoda, a celebrated Japanese potter known for his distinctive scale-like surface patterns. In Japanese, “uroko” literally means scale, and the connection between the pottery and the eyewear is direct, visible, and surprisingly earned. This isn’t one of those cases where a brand name-drops an artist and calls it a day.
Designer: Issey Miyake Eyes
Four lenses sit on each side of the frame, arranged in sequence to mimic the overlapping scale motifs found in Kamoda’s pottery. Each lens features a concave cut, meaning they curve inward rather than outward. That engineering decision is clever. By pulling the lenses inward, they can sit close together without the whole structure ballooning into something unwearable. It’s a practical solution wrapped inside an aesthetic one, and I appreciate when design works that way. Function hiding inside form, each decision earning its place.
The 3D-printed frame goes through a finishing process that intentionally leaves slight surface variations intact. No two pieces are perfectly uniform. That part matters because it mirrors the very thing Kamoda was known for in his ceramics: surfaces that resisted smooth perfection. What could have been a production quirk becomes a design language, a deliberate echo of the source material. It’s the kind of detail you don’t notice immediately but can’t unsee once you do.
Made in collaboration with Kaneko Optical and crafted entirely in Japan, the frame is lightweight titanium, which strikes me as both the right material and the obvious one. Eight lenses on your face need a frame that won’t drag you down by the end of the afternoon. The brushed finish shifts subtly depending on how light falls on it, giving it that quality where the object looks different from one moment to the next. That feels intentional rather than accidental, which again speaks to how much thought went into this.
Seeing UROKO from a distance, I understand why one description floated around: it looks like a necklace before it looks like sunglasses. Only when you get close enough to see the hinges fold and the scale-shapes settle into the familiar form of a pair of frames does the full picture land. That delay, that moment of working out what you’re looking at, is actually the design doing its job. Not all eyewear needs to announce itself from ten feet away.
I’ll admit there’s a part of me that wants to ask whether eight lenses actually changes how you see. The short answer is probably no, not in any technical sense. But I don’t think that’s the point. UROKO isn’t positioning itself as an optical innovation. It’s positioning itself as a wearable object that carries a conversation between contemporary manufacturing and Japanese craft tradition, between function and sculpture, between an artist who shaped clay in the twentieth century and a design house still finding new ways to reference that legacy.
Available in Dark Gray and Brown, and offered in both optical and sunglass versions, UROKO is priced at ¥99,000 JPY, approximately $632 USD. It’s not a casual purchase, but it’s not trying to be. It sits firmly in the category of considered design objects, the kind you buy because you’ve decided to live with something that makes you think a little, even on an ordinary Tuesday.
The real takeaway isn’t about the lenses. It’s about what happens when a design team takes a constraint, in this case the question of how to honor a ceramic artist’s vision through eyewear, and decides not to answer it predictably. Eight lenses is a strange answer. It’s also, once you see UROKO in person, kind of the only answer.
