ALAIN Mikli likes to watch. The eyewear designer may have won almost universal acclaim for the originality of his specs - as well as lucrative contracts from the likes of Jil Sander, Claude Montana and Philippe Starck - but in one respect he is positively cliched. Like a stereotypical Frenchman, he just lurves women. 'I have one problem in my life,' he confesses, 'I love to watch women. And it's easier to do it behind glasses. Sometimes it's even better to wear dark glasses, so if I can no longer see them, I can at least feel them.' It makes him sound like the worst kind of Peeping Tom, but there is nothing shady about this charming Frenchman. Artfully casual in white shirt, black jeans and jacket, his head close shaved and his chin sprinkled with designer stubble, he is refreshingly candid about his appreciation of the female form. Not for him airy-fairy conversations about aesthetics, art and architecture; his reference points are invariably feminine.
Like when he compares his signature eyewear designs to intimate apparel: 'I love working on products that mean nothing on the outside but everything to the wearer, like women's lingerie, which is so intimate but should never be seen by just anybody.' Or his description of a plastic frame he is about to unveil at an optical fair in Milan: 'It's just like a woman's body and all its curves.' Or how a good pair of glasses are sensate and subtle: 'You put them on and it's a private sensation. It is only for those who are wearing it.' For all his incorrigible flirtatiousness, Mikli takes his business very seriously, although he still seems a little taken-aback by the success that has accompanied it. 'I am very surprised at the way my name is now recognised,' he says. He may like to play the laid-back entrepreneur but Mikli has an increasingly strong international presence, with distribution networks based in New York, Germany, Milan, Tokyo and Belgium.
He is certainly already a hit with Hong Kong's spectacle-wearing fraternity; in the two days he was in town on a promotional tour, he sold more than 150 pairs of his signature glasses at about $2,000 each.
The 42-year-old started his own label in Paris 20 years ago. He is still based in a workshop in the 13th arrondisement and his mother, Lucy - who raised Mikli and his sister alone after their father died when he was three - helps him run the business. He also continues to live in a modest district near Chinatown. In fact, he likes to think little has changed since his post-university days when the opthamology graduate obtained a job as an optician.
While he loved the science of caring for the eyes, he says that he began to grow increasingly frustrated with the 'ugly spectacles' around him. 'I couldn't find anything nice,' he says. 'People would come in, feeling terrible because they were told they had to wear glasses, and I couldn't help them find something beautiful to wear. There was nothing I could share with them. All the opticians I knew had no enthusiasm. I was making money but it wasn't enough. I was no longer enjoying what I was doing.' So Mikli gave up his white optician's coat for a sketchpad, and set about committing to paper his vaguely formed ideas for spectacles. They were, he says, 'regular designs and ugly drawings'. He learned by his own mistakes and by the mid-1980s he was ready to ride the wave of conspicuous consumerism, an era when anyone with the money absolutely had to have a pair of high-priced designer glasses.
Mikli says the success of his business initially astounded him. Optical stores in Paris and the rest of Europe started buying his collections, and when fashion designers in the league of Sander and Montana asked him to produce eyewear collections, he was stunned. 'I would never have approached them, even if I thought it was possible. I am much too shy,' he says. 'I don't think I'm such a good designer, and I'm not going to tell you who is because I don't want to promote the competition. But I don't always like all the styles I do, and sometimes when I see what my competitors have done, I get jealous. They do nice things.' By all accounts, his own eyewear creations aren't too shabby. They are, of course, trendy: credit card-thin slices of chrome, tinted aviator shades fixed to a sleek frame, a transparent plastic number tinged with gold. For Starck and his hi-tech, minimalist leanings, Mikli created transparent frames to which lenses are attached with nylon string. He also developed something called 'biovision', again for Starck glasses, which have no screws.