Ross & Brown began in Shanghai in 2017 around a table of friends from different parts of the world. They came from distinct cultural and professional backgrounds, yet shared a precise frustration: the frames they wanted to wear did not exist in the form they imagined. Making their own became a natural response to that gap between expectation and reality. Shanghai provided a particularly fertile starting point. By the early twentieth century, the city had become one of Asia’s key international crossroads, where European Art Deco, Chinese decorative traditions and modernist architecture coexisted within a rapidly shifting urban culture. The City Collection emerged from this framework, pairing Shanghai with the 1930s, Paris with the 1950s and Los Angeles with the 1970s, among others. Each pairing functions as a condensed design archive: architecture, fashion, graphics, furniture, colour and the eyewear of the period itself. The decade becomes a working archive paired with materials such as acetate given its chromatic-tweaking range. In fact, produced in sheets, it allows for variation in colour, translucency, tortoiseshell and layered effects. Once cut and polished, it retains enough depth to give designers precise control over the brow, bridge and lens surround, making it particularly suited to translating historical references into contemporary objects.
From acetate to titanium, and from cities to neighbourhoods
As the brand evolved, its system of references became more granular, extending from cities to neighbourhoods and from material singularity to material plurality. The District Collection introduced names such as NoLo, Hackney, Pigalle, Marvila, Roppongi and Vesterbro. These are condensed cultural environments, defined at street level where architecture, commerce, production and social life overlap continuously. NoLo is particularly illustrative. The name refers to the area north of Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, yet its current identity is relatively recent. It emerged through the gradual layering of independent businesses, creative communities and new residential dynamics over an older urban fabric. The shift from Milano to NoLo therefore signals a change in scale: from city-wide abstraction to lived proximity. The material language of the frames evolved in parallel. Ross & Brown expanded from acetate into beta titanium, combination constructions and rimless structures. Roppongi, for example, combines acetate with beta titanium, while other District models rely on ultra-fine titanium or reduce the frame almost entirely to emphasise the lens.
At a later stage, attention shifted from place as reference to people as carriers of reference.The Wanderlust Chronicles began around 2019 as a series of encounters across cities including Amsterdam, Berlin, Lisbon, Marseille and Cape Town. Rather than treating culture as a set of categories, the project approaches it through individuals. This shift introduces a different understanding of the city itself. Urban identity is not fixed; it accumulates and reorganises over time. Photographers relocate and reframe visual languages. Chefs transfer techniques and ingredients across geographies. Designers accumulate references through successive contexts. Musicians absorb local scenes and later reintroduce fragments elsewhere. Culture circulates through individuals long before it is formalised. Ross & Brown refers to this network as its Citizens of the World: photographers, artists, designers, musicians, DJs, chefs and entrepreneurs working across multiple cultural environments. In doing so, the brand effectively returns to its origin point in Shanghai; where different perspectives first coexisted in the same space and shaped a shared output.
“You don’t become a Citizen of the World by moving. You become one by paying attention to what’s around you.”
