Jacques Marie Mage DEALAN Ti: Breaking the 6mm Titanium Barrier

A Measured Take

• The Jacques Marie Mage DEALAN Ti is the first eyewear frame in the industry to feature a front pressed from a 6mm sheet of beta titanium, surpassing the 5mm manufacturing ceiling that has defined Japanese atelier production for years and requiring a custom-engineered 700-ton press to achieve.
• Part of the TI Series within JMM’s Summer 2026 Circa Collection (ICONOGRAPHIES), limited to 200 pieces per colourway.
• The Dealan is the founding silhouette of the house, first produced in 2015 and inspired by the eyewear worn by Bob Dylan in the 1960s.
• Production spans over 300 steps, including 5-axis CNC milling and five or more passes of hand-polishing.
• Three colourways are available; the AURUM features Polished Light Gold with Polished Silver Palladium accents and Armorlite Darjeeling lenses.

Design & Form

The Dealan silhouette has always been generous in proportion — a bold, architecturally confident frame whose visual weight is part of its identity. In titanium at 6mm thickness, that geometry acquires a new physical authority.

The AURUM colourway is the most immediate demonstration of what two-tone plating can achieve at this scale. Gold dominates in direct sunlight; silver palladium comes forward in shade. The frame shifts chromatically across the day in a manner that collectors of fine watches will recognise from alternating-finish case work. At the bridge, frame-ends, and temples, hairline engravings are applied after the hand-polishing phase — shallow enough to register only to the touch at conversational distance, yet precise enough to reward close inspection. Signature arrowhead front-pins at the junction of front and temple carry the same two-tone plating as the frame body, creating visual continuity across the piece. The 12mm cured cellulose acetate temple sleeves complete the composition, providing tactile contrast against the cooler precision of the metal.

Engineering & Materials

Beta titanium is one of the most demanding materials in eyewear manufacturing: it work-hardens rapidly, absorbs heat unevenly, and grows progressively harder to tool as thickness increases.

The Japanese eyewear industry — centred in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, which produces approximately 95% of all Japanese-made eyewear — had established 5mm as the practical upper limit for titanium frame-front production. Beyond that thickness, existing tooling simply lacked the force to press and form the metal. JMM’s resolution was a custom-engineered 700-ton press, designed specifically for this project. The frame front is then precision-milled on a 5-axis CNC machine, hand-polished across five or more passes, and finished with two-tone metal plating. Welding operations join frame components in 0.5-second bursts with tightly controlled pressure, temperature, and current; smaller parts are bonded by laser welding. The full production sequence runs to over 300 individual steps — a figure that, set against the output of 200 pieces per colourway, underscores why Jacques Marie Mage describes the result as “a breakthrough in eyewear craftsmanship more than three years in the making.”

Heritage & Lineage

When Jerome Jacques Marie Mage founded the house in Los Angeles in 2014, the debut collection followed in 2015: four frames, each handcrafted in Japan from plant-based acetate, each anchored to a specific cultural reference point.

The Dealan was the first of those four. Drawn from the eyewear worn by Bob Dylan in the 1960s, it introduced the JMM visual language to the market and has remained the house’s most closely identified silhouette for a decade. JMM’s founding conviction — that luxury eyewear with the precision of fine watchmaking can operate at the same level of cultural ambition and artisanal craft as haute couture or haute horlogerie — was announced through this frame. Returning to the Dealan for the TI Series is therefore a deliberate act of positioning: the house’s original statement, rebuilt in a material that required the Sabae atelier to exceed its own established limits.

Market Position & Collector Context

For GCC collectors already familiar with limited-run manufacture from the watch world, the DEALAN Ti AURUM colourway speaks directly to that sensibility: 200 pieces, a three-year development cycle, and a manufacturing record that no competing house has matched.

The Summer 2026 Circa Collection, presented under the tagline ICONOGRAPHIES, frames the DEALAN Ti as the technical apex of a decade-spanning retrospective. Within that context, the TI Series carries weight beyond seasonal product release — it marks the point at which JMM’s decade-long pursuit of craft excellence reaches a manufacturing milestone. The DEALAN Ti is available through JMM Galleries, jacquesmariemage.com, and select retail partners worldwide.

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