The French President has reprised his £575 Top Gun shades to meet foreign dignitaries after boosting the sunglasses firm’s shares by 28 per cent.
Emmanuel Macron was photographed today standing outside the Elysee Palace donning his Maison Henry Jullien aviator glasses, which were first seen during his World Economic Forum speech in Davos on Tuesday.
Memes, comments, and speculation over Macron’s appearance flooded social media, with countless references to the 1986 movie Top Gun starring Tom Cruise as LT Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell.
But on Friday, as he welcomed the Democratic Republic of Congo President, Felix Tshisekedi, to Paris, Macron coolly waved to the cameras in his Pacific S 01 Double Gold shades.
He revealed on Wednesday that he had opted for eyewear to hide a subconjunctival haemorrhage, or a burst blood vessel in his right eye, which he called ‘totally benign.’
Macron made light of the look, calling it ‘l’oeil du tigre’ or the ‘eye of the tiger’, in a reference to rock band Survivor’s song used in the 1982 boxing movie Rocky III.
‘For those who get the reference, it’s a sign of determination,’ he said.
However, thanks to Macron’s latest fashion statement, Italian company iVision Tech, which brought legacy French eyewear brand Henry Jullien in 2023, added about £3.1million to its market cap on Thursday after Macron wore the sunglasses during his speech.
This ‘certainly created a wow effect on the stock’, iVision Tech CEO Stefano Fulchir said.
Fulchir told the Guardian that Macron has owned the sunglasses since 2024, when he bought them as a diplomatic gift during the G20 summit, and added a second pair for himself.
‘I said I would be happy to send him a pair, but they said no. He did not accept them as a gift, but wanted to purchase them personally. The French president paid a lot of attention to whether the glasses were entirely made in France,’ Fulchir said.
The glasses are hand assembled and made using what iVision calls an ‘ancient technique’, where gold is bonded rather than plated to the base metal, making it harder wearing.
The blue-tinted UV lenses are produced by Dalloz, another Jura-based company.
Fulchir said the glasses were available at opticians around the world and even in war-ravaged Ukraine, but the company had yet to find a UK distributor.
iVision’s Milan-listed shares rose nearly six per cent on Wednesday, after having been up almost 28 per cent at one point earlier in the day, before being automatically halted from trading.
They briefly resumed trading around 11:15GMT on Thursday before being halted again, and were on track for their highest one-day jump on record.
Even US President Donald Trump commented on the shades, quipping: ‘I watched him yesterday with those beautiful sunglasses. What the hell happened?’ during his own speech at the annual meeting in Davos on Wednesday.
While sunglasses are not necessary to protect vision, those who have the condition that Macron is currently suffering may choose to wear glasses to avoid attracting attention.
Macron ‘opted for this style for aesthetic reasons, because he’s a public figure,’ medical doctor and media commentator Jimmy Mohamed told French broadcaster RTL.
‘Some people might think he’s ill, so to avoid being photographed in that state, he decided to wear sunglasses. The glasses protect his image, but not really his eye.’
Sporting the aviator sunglasses on Tuesday, Macron told Davos officials the world was facing ‘a shift towards a world without rules’, warning that international law was being ‘trampled underfoot’.
He later criticised what he called ‘imperial ambitions’ and said Europe should not hesitate to deploy tools at its disposal to protect its interests amid rising trade threats from the US.
Macron also denounced US competition seeking to ‘subordinate Europe’ and described threatened tariffs as ‘fundamentally unacceptable’, particularly when used as leverage over territorial sovereignty.
The French President is today holding talks with the Congolese President in Paris.
‘Discussions are focused on bilateral issues as well as the situation in the Great Lakes region, in a regional context marked by persistent tensions,’ Radio France said on Friday.
Tshisekedi and Macron are also expected to cover the Paris Conference of October 30, 2025, around peace and prosperity in the Great Lakes region.
Of the £1.3billion pledged at this conference by 70 states and international organizations, all emergency humanitarian funding, amounting to £738million, has already been disbursed, according to French officials.
