Matteo
Piazza
Livans
independent fashion eyewear designer & creative partner
I help fashion houses and eyewear companies define the eyewear language that belongs to them — from first intuition to final collection.
WHO I AM
I’ve spent more than two decades moving solo across the eyewear design world, from the giants of the business to the front lines of some of the world’s most influential fashion houses — close enough to feel their pulse, far enough to keep my own.
I worked directly with creative directors, navigating their visions, their tempo, their pressures, always with the freedom of someone who belongs without ever being absorbed. Before that, I was forged within some of the optical industry's top players, learning how the commercial machinery squeezes identity into objects — and how to keep the vision alive through the process. On another frequency, I moved through independent circuits where ideas come raw, fast and unfiltered, and I co-ran a niche eyewear company — avantgarde microcosms that kept my eye tuned to what moves before the market names it.
After twenty years, experience stops being a matter of time and becomes something no trend report can replace: memory — the ability to recognize patterns, returns, false novelties, real shifts. All of it become judgement, and that's what I bring to a world of infinite references and endlessly generatable possibilities.
Today I work along the fault line where culture, craft, fashion and industry collide — helping luxury fashion houses and eyewear companies turn identity into eyewear that feels relevant, distinctive and unmistakably theirs.
SELECTED WORK
Everything starts raw somewhere. I grew up between small-town grit, club culture noise, and the gravity of classical Venetian art — suspended between roughness and refinement without ever choosing a side. That tension still guides me in fashion’s inner rooms, tuned to the tremors that shaped my eye long before this became a career.
THE EYE BESIDE THE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Fashion houses know exactly why they call me in.
When eyewear becomes a licensing playground, the room fills with voices trying to sound inevitable. Commercial requests. Product constraints. Timelines. Opinions. Sales results dressed up as vision. And the familiar “this is what the market needs” said today, backed by yesterday, obsolete by tomorrow.
My presence shifts the balance.
After more than twenty years across the different faces of the eyewear world, I know the different weights at play when creative, product, marketing and business interests meet around the same table — what is really driving a position, what can move, and what is simply framed as untouchable. Over time, I’ve also built the kind of relationships that keep me connected to the parts of the industry that usually stay off-limits — the things no briefing, presentation or trade fair will ever show you. A kind of backstage access to the backstage.
That changes the room.
Creative directors don’t need eyewear reduced to a corporate domain. They need someone who can move through intuition, culture, process and industry without losing the thread — someone who knows where to push, when to edit, and how to give form to their vision through eyewear in a language that survives the journey and still feels unmistakably theirs.
I don’t take control of the eyewear narrative. I bring it back into focus.
And yes, that can make me inconvenient in some rooms.
But those who build worlds, not catalogues, know exactly why I’m there.
CONTACT
To the people who crossed my path — mentors, peers, quiet guides along the way, and the ones who pushed from the edges: Thank you for the challenges shared in workshops, backrooms, and late nights that shaped the way forward. This journey carries traces of all of you.
Valentino ǀ 2013 Crystal Camou capsule
© 2026 Matteo Piazza Livans - all rights reserved — images courtesy of Livans Foundation Trust