Halloween 2018: Goggly

After looking into motorcycle helmets, I was hopeful that the goggles would be just as straightforward.  She’s wearing what appear to be vintage brown aviator motorcycle goggles with a smoked lens and a striped band.  Simple, right?

Most of my results, and most of the costumes I looked it had things like this.

Hey, these are super cool, and definitely work!  But they’re missing a few key details.

First of all, Haruko’s goggles in the show are undeniably, definitely, brown.  They’re black in some of the concept art, but not all, and they’re shown with a lighter color lining in many images that matches the color of her gloves.  Second, she does not have the harsh bend in her lenses like the goggles do above. There’s maybe one or two concept pieces I have seen that do have it, but the majority of them bend without the angle being that clearly defined. And, third, there’s the connector piece on the nose bridge that looks nothing like the aviators above.  That stays consistent throughout all of the art.

So, with this knowledge, I set to work trying to find what her goggles were actually based off of, if anything.  I had a gut feeling they were real, or at least close enough to something real that I could find something useful, and I also wanted goggles to pair with my helmet for riding around, because goggles are cool.

My first thought was, the helmet is Davida, what about the goggles?  Some digging revealed that there’s a type of goggles called Climax 510 Square Pear, which looks pretty damn spot on.  

These are actually made to go with the Davida helmets, and it seemed like I had easily found my goggles!  

But, wait.

There are some extra bits around the lens surrounds, and these aren’t brown.  Not to mention the strap isn’t quite right, and the lenses aren’t smoked. All of these are minor details, but I decided to keep digging - obviously she was wearing something vintage, so maybe I had to search for an older style.

These are pretty vintage in terms of Climax 510.  Closer - a lot closer in terms of color and the size of the leather part, but still not quite exactly what I was looking for.  The things on the top of the lenses are no right, the strap isn’t right, and, well, why not keep looking?

I went down many goggle rabbit holes.  I searched every combination of goggle cafe rider motorcycle vintage aviator that I could find, and was pretty close to calling it quits and going with the current Climax 510, but I kept digging.  Somehow, I ended up discovering these.

Brown goggles with a lining that matches the gloves?  The proper, not too harsh of an angle smoked lens shape?  Nothing odd on the lens surrounds? And...a striped band?

These are Ariete vintage goggles, or a reproduction of them - Ariete 13990-NRF, to be precise.  But they have been around a while, and though they are currently making some badass modern motorcycle goggles, they also made things like this.

Hey, would you look at that strap?  That looks familiar and very close to the strip pattern that Haruko’s goggles have!  

Trying to dig further into vintage Ariete goggle history didn’t lead me to too much, but I found a few other goggles that were brown with black and white straps, and when I searched similar or related companies, nothing came close compared to the Ariete.  I have no confirmation that these are actually what Haruko is wearing, but they are really damn close.  Look at the shape of the nosebridge piece, the lenses, the color of the lenses.  Even if these aren’t them, they could very well be!

It also seemed like the Ariete Vintage 13990-NRF was a remake of their vintage goggles, and hard to find one at that.  Every store in the US was sold out. I couldn’t find anything in the UK either. I ended up finding them at a little motorcycling provisions store in Italy, where I ordered them entirely in Italian.  Thank you, Google Translate.

Of all of the various things that I ordered, I was not expecting the goggles to be the first to arrive.  They went from Italy to California in about four days, which is pretty impressive, and the “Italianization” of my name was downright adorable.  Upon unboxing, I noted that they looked just as good at the photos, they were super light, and they were also really comfortable. They looked exactly like Haruko’s goggles.  The straps don’t quite match what she has in the show, but they are super close, and I’m going to leave it as a CBB if I have time at the end of all of this.