Love your glares (Should I know you?)

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The Ilori store in SoHo must be one of the only sunglass emporiums with a VIP room. Lounging there with a flute of Moët, nibbling dark chocolate, shoppers can ponder just the right accessory to create the allure that they are Somebodies.

Will these Tom Ford wood-and-steel aviators convince onlookers that my natural habitat is the red carpet? Will Ralph Lauren’s $350 shades suggest I have stepped off a yacht in Edgartown?

To see for themselves, shoppers can peer into six full-length mirrors around the store, the better to coordinate their eyewear and their entire outfit. This is what appealed to Olivia Munoz, who was scrutinising her image from head to toe recently while trying on the wares. “I’m beginning to love sunglasses as much as I love shoes and bags and jewellery,” said Munoz, 21, a student at the University of Mississippi.

Prices for designer sunglasses have jumped to $350 or more in recent months, from an average of $250, retailers say, and the price spike has not turned off shoppers. “The youth of America has discovered sunglasses to be the aspirational and prestige item of the moment,” said Marshal Cohen, a senior analyst with the NPD Group, a market research firm. He predicts, “Sunglasses will replace the handbag as the image item” among teenage girls and young women.

While sales of handbags declined 14% in the last year, according to NPD, total sales in the $3 billion eyewear industry rose by 10%, even while the number of individual glasses sold has slackened — an indication there has been significant growth at the upper end of the market, Cohen said.

Why are designer sunglasses bucking the downturn of other luxury goods? Retailers and other fashion authorities cite It-bag fatigue (women have bought more bags in recent years than they can store in their closets), whereas sunglasses are still a novel way to acquire the designer cachet.