Google Doodle Honors Harlequin Frame Inventor Altina Schinasi on Her 116th Birthday

Google celebrated the 116th birthday on Friday of sculptor, documentary filmmaker, and inventor Altina Schinasi with a pair of orange cat’s-eye glasses framing the company logo.

Born August 4, 1907, Schinasi was a native New Yorker who studied art in Paris. She began her creative career as a window dresser for New York’s Fifth Avenue luxury storefronts.

In her role as a window dresser, she helped Salvador Dalí fully realize and execute his window designs at Bonwit Teller & Co. department store. At the same time, she took art classes at the Art Students League of New York, where artists Howard Warshaw and George Grosz were her instructors.

After noticing the lack of options for women’s glasses, she invented the harlequin shape, or cat’s-eye, glasses for which she is probably most known. One shop owner took to her creation and grabbed the rights to the frames for six months, leading to her design’s huge success as a must-have fashion accessory among American women in the late 1930s and ’40s.

Schinasi’s invention earned her Lord & Taylor’s American Design Award in 1939 and received recognition from notable magazines such as Life and Vogue.

She ventured into filmmaking with a 1960 documentary about her teacher George Grosz; titled Interregnum and narrated by Lotte Lenya, the film garnered an Academy Award nomination and was honored at the Venice Film Festival.

Schinasi supported the Civil Rights movement. She acquired the film rights to Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, and met with King, Rosa Parks, and Ralph Abernathy in an effort to secure funding for the project, which proved unsuccessful.

Not unlike her iconic frames, Schinasi’s sculptures embodied both refined aesthetics and functionality. Her 1970s “chairacters,” made from plaster, fiberglass, and wood, were chairs and benches that intriguingly incorporated human forms. She was also known to draw and paint.

Schinasi was the subject of the biopic Altina (2013) and penned a memoir The Road I Have Traveled (1995).

Schinasi died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1999, at age 92.

Past Google doodles have honored established artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Pacita Abad. They have also been used to commemorate dates, events, and holidays.