Sun Buddies Turned Two Menswear Podcasters’ Broken and Unidentifiable Grails Into New Frames

James Harris sat on his favorite vintage sunglasses years ago. Lawrence Schlossman never identified his own grail pair. Sun Buddies just fixed both problems.

James Harris had a favorite pair of vintage sunglasses. Then, at some point, he sat on them. Lawrence Schlossman, his co-host on the menswear and culture podcast Throwing Fits, had a different problem: a grail pair of shades he loved but could never actually identify, no maker, no model, nothing to search for. Those two small, semi-tragic footnotes turned into the origin story behind Sun Buddies‘ newest collaboration, a pair of exclusive frames named, without much ceremony, after the two men who inspired them.

The collection launched July 30, 2026, out of New York, billed on Sun Buddies’ own site as two exclusive frames made in partnership with Throwing Fits. One model is called the Jimmy. The other is the Larry. Both nicknames will be familiar to anyone who has listened to even a few episodes: Harris goes by Jimmy on the show, Schlossman goes by Larry, and Sun Buddies effectively built each man a replacement for the eyewear he’d lost, one to gravity and one to time.

 

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Harris and Schlossman have been working together for a long time. They met in 2011 at a fashion PR and events agency, then joined Complex Media together the following year, Harris running the Complex Style vertical while Schlossman took over the site’s irreverent menswear blog, Four Pins, as editor-in-chief. Together they launched the video series Fashion Bros in 2014. Their podcast started in 2016 as a side project called Failing Upwards, recorded out of Grailed, where Schlossman had moved on to become brand director. Barstool Sports acquired the show in 2017; Harris and Schlossman left a few years later over disagreements about revenue sharing and relaunched it under its current name in 2020. The show is still recorded out of Harris’s own apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a detail that lines up with the very New York framing Sun Buddies put on this release.

Six years into its current run, Throwing Fits has become one of the more consistently name-checked podcasts in menswear. It has been written up by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, The Business of Fashion, Vogue, and SSENSE, and by its own account counts millions of listeners and thousands of Patreon subscribers among its audience, a fan base the hosts refer to as the “Throw Gang.” Guests have ranged from fashion designers and rappers to authors like David Sedaris, and a sideline in merchandise and collaborations has grown steadily alongside the show itself.

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Part of what makes naming a product line after Harris and Schlossman a workable idea, rather than just an inside joke, is that both men had already built personal brands before Throwing Fits existed. Schlossman, a 2009 Wake Forest graduate, got his start blogging as Sartorially Inclined and posting to a Tumblr under the handle “howtotalktogirlsatparties,” work that eventually led to the Four Pins editor-in-chief job and, later, the brand director role at Grailed. Harris’s path ran through Complex Style before a stint as vice president of content at Def Jam Records. Between them, the two have logged more than a decade at outlets including Complex, Four Pins, Def Jam, Snapchat, and Grailed, all before they ever turned Throwing Fits into a full-time job.

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Sun Buddies is the in-house eyewear line of Très Bien, the Malmö, Sweden-based retailer and label whose staff Throwing Fits refers to, affectionately, as “the Malmömies.” Très Bien was founded in 2006 by brothers Hannes and Simon Hogeman along with childhood friends Björn Lindén and Jakob Törnberg, and grew from a menswear shop that mixed high fashion with streetwear into a retailer with its own ready-to-wear line and a store presence in both Malmö and London.

Sun Buddies came later, in 2013, as the Hogeman brothers’ own eyewear label under the Très Bien umbrella. (Some retail listings for the brand cite 2006 as Sun Buddies’ own founding year, which appears to conflate the label’s start with Très Bien’s; the founders’ own account, along with most retailer and press listings, points to 2013.) The debut frame, Type 01, took its cue from the sunglasses actress Bibi Andersson wore in Ingmar Bergman‘s 1966 film Persona, shot on the Swedish island of Fårö. Every Sun Buddies frame since has been made from premium Italian Mazzucchelli acetate, largely by hand, and the brand has built a reputation for pulling sil from pop culture and running them back through a Scandinavian, slightly nostalgic filter. Its past convincers include Stüssy, Eckhaus Latta, Sneeze Magazine, Dover Street Market, Opening Ceremony, Carhartt WIP, and Polar Skate Co.

 

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The language on the Throwing Fits product pages, “created in partnership with the Malmö homies,” is consistent with how the podcast has talked about Sun Buddies for years now: as an actual favorite, not just a brand willing to put a logo on something.

Naming a frame after a real person is also well within Sun Buddies’ established playbook, even if the brand hasn’t done it quite like this before. Its Miuccia model is a nod to Miuccia Prada‘s own glasses; its Courtney is a riff on the 90s “clout goggles” look popularized by Kurt Cobain and later worn by Playboi Carti. Where those designs reference famous faces from a distance, the Jimmy and the Larry work the other way around, built in direct consultation with the two people they’re named for rather than reverse-engineered from an old photograph.

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Despite sharing an origin story, the two frames don’t look much alike. The Jimmy is a subtle cat-eye shape, built from Italian Mazzuchelli bio-acetate and fitted with tonal dark grey category 3 lenses, a lens rating that indicates strong glare reduction and full protection from UVA and UVB rays. It measures 52 by 16 by 151 millimeters. The Larry takes a softer, more rectangular shape, cut from a tortoise version of the same Mazzuchelli acetate and paired with deep navy grey category 3 lenses, with the same UV coverage. It measures 50 by 18 by 155 millimeters, very slightly wider and longer in the temple than its counterpart.

Both frames are priced at 1,600 Swedish kronor, which converts to roughly $170 at current exchange rates, and both ship with a black faux-leather Sun Buddies case and a cleaning cloth. Sun Buddies’ own product pages are explicit that the two are sold separately rather than as a paired set, which tracks with the idea that each frame was built around one specific person’s story rather than as a matched his-and-his release.

There’s a small detail buried in the design that longtime listeners will likely clock before anyone else does. Throwing Fits’ own newsletter has previously described Harris as partial to Sun Buddies’ sportier Kerry model and its cat-eye Ethan, while Schlossman was said to favor the brand’s Lubna style. The new Jimmy, a cat-eye by design, lines up neatly with that established taste; the Larry, a soft rectangular frame, is a somewhat different direction from the Lubna but still sits comfortably in the same wheelhouse.

Both frames are sold directly through Sun Buddies’ own site rather than through Throwing Fits’ own storefront, and shipping runs well beyond North America and Sweden, with regional pricing and delivery set up for most of Europe, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and a long list of other markets. Orders ship via UPS Standard, with a stated delivery window of two to seven business days.

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This is not Throwing Fits and Sun Buddies’ first moment together. Well before the Jimmy and the Larry existed, Throwing Fits ran a private sale for its audience across the entire Sun Buddies archive, discounting more than 100 pairs of glasses and describing the brand in its own newsletter as its favorite sunglasses label, period. That same post referred to Sun Buddies as “the shades arm of Très Bien,” the exact framing Sun Buddies uses to describe itself, and noted that the brand had already made regular appearances in the hosts’ own outfit photos well before any formal connection existed.

That prior relationship is part of what makes this drop read less like a typical logo-swap collide and more like two parties formalizing something that was already true. Sun Buddies’ own copy leans into that reading directly, describing Harris and Schlossman as “longtime friends” of the brand rather than as a newly signed partner.

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The Sun Buddies collision slots into a broader pattern for Throwing Fits, which has spent the past several years turning its hosts’ personal taste into an actual production slate. In 2023, the show partnered with GANT on a curated archive installation in New York. The following year brought two more projects: a curation with online retailer Mr Porter that pulled together 74 pieces across 13 brands, and a 14-piece capsule with Italian outerwear label C.P. Company, which reworked overshirts, down jackets, pants, T-shirts, and knitwear with customized pockets and embroidered detailing.

 

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Those sit alongside an earlier run of releases the hosts have described as their “Post-Sneaker World” agenda: a pair of loafers designed with Brooklyn footwear label Blackstock & Weber, a pair of boots with Italian shoemaker Diemme, a run of carpenter trousers with denim brand 3sixteen, and even a fragrance collaboration with scent house Hawthorne. The through line across all of it is the same one running through the Sun Buddies release: Harris and Schlossman turning their own established taste, and occasionally their own personal mishaps, into products other people can actually buy.

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The clearest proof that the frames have made it into regular rotation showed up a few weeks after launch, when menswear outlet InsideHook photographed Schlossman for the debut installment of a new recurring style feature. In the shot, taken on a dry cleaning run, he’s wearing the new Larry sunglasses alongside a haircut from his regular barber, a vintage GAP pocket T-shirt, cut-off camo cargo shorts, and a pair of Havaianas, the kind of unremarkable, real-life outfit the frames were apparently built to disappear into rather than dominate.

The writer behind that piece, Christopher Fenimore, has his own history with Schlossman that predates Throwing Fits entirely. Fenimore first photographed him for a street style blog outside Capsule, a now-defunct trade show, roughly fourteen years ago, then went on to work for him as an in-house photographer at Grailed five years later. That kind of overlapping, decade-plus résumé is fairly typical of the small world Harris and Schlossman operate in, one where a menswear blogger, a brand director, a podcast host, and a sunglasses collaborator are frequently the same handful of people wearing different hats over time.

why

The collide’s own branding leans hard into geography that doesn’t entirely match up. Sun Buddies’ connection page opens with “New York, USA” in block capitals, even though the frames themselves are designed and produced through Très Bien’s Malmö operation using Italian acetate. That tension isn’t hidden so much as built into the pitch: Throwing Fits supplies the New York point of view and the two names on the box, while Sun Buddies supplies the Swedish manufacturing and design language it’s spent more than a decade refining. Neither side seems especially bothered by the mismatch, and the two frames’ straightforward names, no clever portmanteau, no seasonal collection title, suggest the whole project was built to read as a friendship first and a marketing exercise second.