Peter Yee and Oakley: futuristic fashion’s unsung hero
Seemingly an overnight success story, the cultural landscape of the 90s to 2000s wouldn’t have been the same without Oakley’s iconic eyewear designs. The American sportswear establishment’s trailblazing legacy, although made up of multiple factors, is the direct result of designer Peter Yee’s future forward imagination. But who is Peter Yee? sabukaru explores his legacy further.
Oakley’s hyper futuristic models like the Eye Jacket, OVERTHETOP, and the Time Bomb are seen throughout the style and sports industries either as originals designed by Oakley or one of the their many variations co-opted by another brand. The designs were a harmony of “form and function” and started a wave of sportswear looks that ruled runways and the everyday looks of subcultures today.
Peter Yee: An Introduction to a Master
The genius behind these prolific designs? Meet Oakley’s best kept secret, Peter Yee. As the former Vice President of Industrial Design at Oakley, Inc. from 1993 to 2018, his contributions made a tremendous impact on Oakley’s design ethos and brand identity.
Tasked with designing pieces intended for world class athletic events where performance is at the forefront, Peter Yee creatively problem solved to make his designs highly functional, while keeping a spirit of aesthetic experimentalism. The product of this fusion, is a highly wearable repertoire of accessories made for Oakley that transcend the idea of sportswear, forever changing the outlook for the entire industry.
“For me, creativity has always been about finding solutions. And sometimes the most ingenious solutions are the simplest. Of course, there’s a lot of work that goes into making meaningful things seem simple.”
Peter Yee’s onboarding as Oakley’s designer was essentially a symbol of being in the “right place at the right time”. The brand's founder, Jim Jannard, was already in a transitional phase for Oakley’s brand identity when the two first crossed paths. After seeing the ArtCenter fresh grad, whose previous work for the company included designing the Oakley logo itself, earned Jannard’s trust and resulted in Yee’s promotion to Senior Design Director in 2008. The decision to put the designer at the forefront of Oakley’s design process, started a dynamic shift that would go on to rattle the world of sportswear.
Peter Yee surrounded by eyewear prototypes
Yee’s ability to design never-before-seen styles of eyewear was made possible only because of the strong synergy with Jannard. In a recent interview with Drew Heifetz, Yee mentioned how Jannard was always open to experimenting with ideas that Yee would present to him—which resulted in a sense of bravery allowing these designs despite their “newness,” had yet to come to fruition.
The mutual trust among the team members was arguably the most integral ingredient, which allowed the Oakley brand to elevate itself, consequently changing the public’s, as well as fashion's perception of the brand; from its inception of being manufacturers of durable designs during the 70s-80s, to being viewed as an experimental yet reliable brand during early 2000s.
Image via @peteryeedesign on Instagram
The design process for all of Yee’s products were quite unique, especially during his first years at the helm of Oakley. Yee sought inspiration from areas outside of the realm of sports. Although he designed activewear according to his instinct as an industrial designer, he believed staying within the same sphere and design language of what one wants to design [ex: eyewear], would ultimately result in duplicating certain characteristics that had been tiredly done before by others.
Instead of taking inspiration from other eyewear brands, Yee focused on things that were associated with the speed and performance such as race cars that have fluid, dynamic properties; parallelling the needs of athletes to improve and excel in their overall performance.
Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordon sporting Oakley glasses
He applied the concept of “accelerating curves” creating a continuous, dynamic flow throughout all his designs. This refreshing idea propelled the transition to Oakley’s new brand identity, focusing more on futurism and hyper functionality, stepping away from the conventional eyewear designs of the time period that involved geometric, sharp, and flat styles.
NBA player Dennis Rodman a dedicated fan of Yee’s designs
Straying From Analog Design: Yee Goes Digital
Yee’s design process from square one strayed away from tradition. His blueprints and sketches for new products applied the concept of futurism by using digital technology when design software first emerged during the 2000s.
Yee’s design for the Eye Jacket, was the first eyewear frame digitally designed on a computer. Continuing the success of the Eye Jacket’s “continuous flowing curvatures”,Yee perfected the art of harmonizing art and engineering concepts: giving birth to streamlined and futuristic designs that stand the test of time in the ever-changing world of fashion.
The Eye Jacket
The “Eye Jacket” is representative of Oakley and Peter Yee’s relationship, and a symbol of Yee’s signature touch on the brand’s design identity that pushed for hyper-modernity. Showcased in 1994, the Eye Jacket was a “first” for Oakley in numerous ways.
Michael Jordon wearing the Eye Jacket
As mentioned earlier, the Eye Jacket was the first piece of eyewear for Oakley’s departure from traditional means, transitioning to using CAD software [Computer-Aided-Design], a tool commonly used by architects and engineers, to help replace manual sketching/drafting. It features Oakley’s now-signature wraparound look, where sunglasses contour to the user’s face like a glove –or in this case –a jacket. Accomplished by the use of a integrated hinge design on the arms of the glasses, which helps to blend into its streamline shape; creating the illusion that it is a singular piece.
A sketch of the Eye Jacket
Furthermore, the Eye Jacket is an introduction to Oakley’s new design principles of “accelerating curves and compound curvature continuous surfaces”; a streamline fluidity that integrates all components of the glasses into a uniform aerodynamic-like curved design, opposite from conventional eyewear designs that have clearly delineated sharp corners.
Legendary basketball stars Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman were firm enthusiasts of Oakley sunglasses, especially the Eye Jacket. The sleek design of these sunglasses have also become inspiration for luxury fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, and more recently, Balenciaga, who created similar styles of eyewear in their recent Spring/Summer 2022 line.
The OVERTHETOP, Continuing Eyewear Innovation
The Overthetop’s worn with style
One of the most unique and prolific eyewear designs that propelled Oakley into the eye of fashion is the OVERTHETOP; sunglasses that strayed away from the traditional arms technically called “temples” that attach a pair of glass/plastic frames to our eyes.
Debuting at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, the OVERTHETOP caused a minor sensation when it was revealed to the masses, shocking the announcers and the world, when it was seen on the likes of Ato Boldon an athlete competing in the Olympic 100 meter dash.
Ato Boldon wearing Yee’s Oakley designs mid competition
It was a defining moment where high performance peripherals made a vivid “fashion” statement, consequently positioning Oakley as a revolutionary institution [even to this day] for performance eyewear.
Taking inspiration from other Oakley products like the Time Bomb watch and the M-Frame, this unique piece of eyewear remains true to its brand identity, by utilizing design elements from existing models, notably pushing for seamlessness that abolished any sharp edges typically found in glasses design.
Samples of OVERTHETOP’s
Rapper Flavor Flav wearing Oakley
Yee stated that they accomplished the OVERTHETOP’s perfect fit from mapping out the shape of a skull digitally, to better contour the user’s head, rather than a more traditional round shape that hooked at the ears. Moving away from everything they knew about eyewear and towards thinking outside of the box, the OVERTHETOP was a courageous and successful execution to shock the world and draw attention to the brand.
The creative mind of Yee flows within Oakley’s core designs, combining aspects of his background in industrial design with innovation.
The Time Bomb: Oakley’s First Watch
Yee is anything but a one trick pony. Deviating from simply innovating eyewear, one of his first designs for Oakley was actually a watch -the brand's first original watch design in history, cheekily named the Time Bomb.
Created in 1998, this piece is yet another revolutionary design that breaks away from traditional watches seen in that era [and arguably the years after]. The watches initial design takes inspiration from the M-Frame, a unibody sports performance eyeglass Oakley created for the 1996 Olympics.
Michael Jordon wearing the Timebomb
The Time Bomb features a sleek spine-like band that blends in with the entirety of the watch itself, that looks more like a thick bangle than a wristwatch. Its aerodynamic, stealthy shape is reminiscent of UFO spacecrafts; a fitting description for a watch design that has not been done before. The creation of the Time Bomb was yet another disruption in the world of design from Oakley and Yee, bringing a refreshing interpretation that combines the brand’s ethos to the world of timepieces.
Yee’s Streamlined Design Legacy Lives On
Peter Yee has left an incredible mark on Oakley and the world of design. Bridging the gap between pure creativity and modern engineering, showing that these two mediums can indeed work together. His career is an example of the endless possibilities of human creativity that branches beyond the constraints of how things are supposed to be, and not allowing the weight of risk anchor his future-forward imagination. A living embodiment of a rhetoric to encourage creative minds to always think outside of the box, to find inspiration in overlooked/unseen areas, and to create something that stands the test of time.
Yee, in an Instagram post showing his often worn Oakley dog tag writes “Total World Domination,” an ideology that Yee and Oakley held closely to their hearts. Some say that it’s wishful thinking at the time, however, to say the least, time was on their side; the world that Oakley envisioned has come to life, one design at a time.
photo credit @peteryeedesign
Words by
Corwyn M, a writer based in California, exploring subcultures of fashion, music, media, etc.
Edited by Ora Margolis and Ken Kitamura
Layout by Sadaf Leily
