Oliver Peoples to GLCO: How the Leight Family Built L.A. Eyewear Twice

By Tom Whitfield

Larry Leight and his co-founders sold Oliver Peoples to Oakley in February 2006, yet the Leight family has never left the Los Angeles eyewear business. Larry's son Garrett opened his own store, Garrett Leight California Optical (GLCO), on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice in 2009 — one day, symbolically, after the anniversary of his father's founding date.

"I think [Oliver Peoples] opened November 5 and we opened November 6. His was 1986, mine was 2009," Garrett told the Los Angeles Times' Image magazine, which published the story as part of its November Preservation issue.

How did a Sunset Plaza shop become an era-defining brand?

Larry Leight, a Santa Monica native, struggled to find a career before training as an optician through a program at L.A. City College. He and his partners — his brother Dennis and friend Kenny Schwartz — began collecting vintage frames to sell in a Sunset Plaza storefront in West Hollywood in 1986.

The breakthrough came from an estate sale of mid-century frames. The haul carried the name Oliver Peoples. The Leights adopted it as their company name.

A second break came in Japan, where Larry found a pair of IM-101 Issey Miyake sunglasses with a solid bar over oval lenses. He designed a take on the style called the I'dentity. The frames landed on Andy Warhol for a Vogue Germany shoot and became a sensation in the U.S.

Larry's design philosophy drew on heritage luxury. "My biggest inspiration was Hermès, quite honestly," he said. "I love what they did, how they did it and how there was no logo on the Birkin bag. And they never departed from it being hard to get. That stuck with me from day one."

He also looked backward deliberately. "When we were inspired to design our own collection, we were inspired by old companies like American Optical or Bausch and Lomb from the '30s and '40s," Larry said. "I just remember every time that we made sales, the best sellers were the simplest, classiest intellectual pieces of eyewear."

Oliver Peoples ran counter to the other dominant L.A. eyewear brand of the era, l.a.Eyeworks, whose Melrose storefront championed bold colors and avant-garde design. Torrance-based artist and gallerist Michael Brunswick framed the difference in retail terms: "It's not about the specific frame. It's about picturing those frames on people."

Brent Zerger, director of communications for l.a.Eyeworks, arrived in Los Angeles in 1991 for a curatorial position at MOCA and became an Oliver Peoples convert. "Nobody embraced '90s minimalism like the art world," Zerger said. "It was time to trade in my preppy tortoise P3s for something that seemed more elevated and sophisticated; more grown up and thoughtful. I ended up at Oliver Peoples at Sunset Plaza."

The store drew fashion's elite passing through Los Angeles. Larry cited Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Elle creative director Gilles Bensimon as regular customers. Oliver Peoples frames appeared in high-end fashion campaigns and became synonymous with the '90s runway aesthetic. "You can imagine the word of mouth right then just spread all over," Larry said.

What is Garrett Leight's GLCO?

Garrett Leight started in the family business working in the back of the Sunset Plaza store. "I remember being 12 years old and reorganizing all the written files of all the patients and seeing Larry David's name in there. And Jennifer Aniston. That was always wild," he said.

He worked for Oliver Peoples in the early 2000s and, by his father's account, wished the family had not sold in 2006. After a trip to Europe, he decided to open his own optical store.

"My son worked for us and he totally got what we did," Larry said. "When we sold in 2006, he kind of wished I kept the company. He decided after a trip to Europe that he wanted to open his own optical store."

Garrett chose Venice over West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, opening as A. Kinney Court in 2009. "When we opened [as A. Kinney Court] on Abbot Kinney in 2009, it was basically entirely archives," he said. "We took old Oliver Peoples frames and sold vintage. But we also did books, music, shoes and some clothes." GLCO also ran a print publication for writers and photographers Garrett favored, and avoided the glossy fantasy campaigns of his father's era.

Like Oliver Peoples before it, GLCO anchored a neighborhood's transformation — in its case, Venice's shift from a gritty skate-and-surf tourist destination toward the tech enclave it is now.

Why does the Silver Lake archive matter now?

In 2026, Garrett converted his Silver Lake storefront into an archive of vintage frames, including the Oliver Peoples 523 — the style Brad Pitt wore in "Fight Club." The move tracks luxury culture's eastward drift in Los Angeles, from West Hollywood to Venice to a gentrified Silver Lake.

Garrett argues the fundamentals of eyewear retail have not moved. "If you can give a customer a really good experience, especially in a neighborhood type of setting, and then they go to school and there's other parents that are wearing the glasses and they're just like, 'Where'd you get that? Oh, I shop there, too.' That is super effective. It's powerful and it hasn't changed," he said.

Larry, now retired in Hawaii for six years, retains the salesman's verve — and the store's lore. He recalls employee Toni confronting Ringo Starr in the shop: "She goes up to him and says, 'Don't move.' Plucks it from his nose. Ringo's nose. And we're looking at her. And he laughs."

Oliver Peoples sits today inside EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear conglomerate that owns Oakley. The Leight name endures independently through GLCO. As Sunset Plaza's legacy retailers close and chains replace independent shops across Venice and Silver Lake, the family's two-storehold — one archive-laden storefront east of Hollywood — stands as a working monument to four decades of Los Angeles eyewear craft.