There are ages when fashion resembles those dying kingdoms that borrow their splendor from ruins they no longer understand. Thus the great French sunglasses return today, broad as the visors of tragic heroines, emerging in the middle of a world endlessly absorbed in admiring itself through the glowing mirrors of telephones. Once, France crafted its frames in the snowy silence of the Jura mountains; now they appear mostly between two filtered photographs, worn by digital muses whose fame travels at the speed of a supermarket advertisement.

I sometimes think of the craftsmen of the Jura, bent over their workbenches with that solemn patience belonging to men who labor for permanence. They could hardly have imagined that one day their heirs would watch their creations drifting through the endless currents of social media, perched upon the faces of models with lips swollen by artificial light and cosmetic boredom. The new priestesses of fashion, universal supermarket bimbos nourished on selfies and candy-colored cocktails, celebrate French eyewear much as one celebrates a perfume without knowing either the flower or the country from which it came. They speak of Paris with the accent of international airports and would probably place the Jura somewhere between Bali and Ibiza on a crumpled map tucked into a beach bag.

And yet, despite this strange modern masquerade, something still resists. Behind the advertising campaigns, beyond the screen-polished faces and vacant gazes of seasonal influencers, there remains the persistent shadow of an older, deeper French elegance. The large black frames still move through the boulevards of Paris like wandering memories of a melancholic refinement. Perhaps that is the destiny of beautiful objects: to survive even those who display them, just as cathedrals outlive the distracted crowds who pass before them without ever lifting their eyes.

FM