If you watch MTV or read fashion magazines, you’ve probably seen Stevie Boi’s work. Remember the jewel-encrusted sunglasses Lady Gaga wore on her Monster Ball tour? Boi made those. In fact, the 22-year-old Baltimore-based designer is largely responsible for the extravagant, impractical turn that high-fashion eyewear has taken in the last couple of years. Big-name designers had already created dazzling sunglasses that you couldn’t find at the mall, but Boi upped the ante considerably.

Stevie Boi was the first to make glasses whose lenses—not just the frames—sparkled with rhinestones, sport spikes, studs, or fabric. (As a result, Boi’s web site lists the visibility level each pair of glasses provides—some dip as low as 20 percent, another indication that these glasses are made to be seen rather than for seeing.) Some of Boi’s more adventurous designs are fabricated from syringes, or shaped like guns or brass knuckles. They range in price from $50 to $500 , but one pair made of real gold and recently featured in Japanese Vogue is going for $55,000.

Boi calls himself a “celebrity designer,” and as his career advances the phrase has taken on a double meaning: He creates designs for celebrities, but he is also becoming something of a celebrity in his own right. At last year’s Fashion Week in New York, Boi began shooting a show with MTV that features him talking with his famous friends—“I don’t know what they’re going to do with it,” Boi says—and photos of him now show up in fashion magazines like Vogue.

So, it’s surprising—and, for the skeptical observer of the whole celebrity phenomenon, refreshing—to find Boi at a Denny’s restaurant in Bel Air on Christmas Eve afternoon, the day we’d agreed to talk over the phone. He’s with his sister and what sounds like a group of children. We can’t hear each other at all over the racket of clanging silverware and inquiring waitresses. “It’s too loud in here,” he says. “Let me go into the bathroom, maybe we can talk there.” (We end up postponing the conversation.)

Though Boi hangs with superstars, he doesn’t look to them for inspiration. He hasn’t fled to New York City. Instead, he continues to work in and draw inspiration from what he calls the “pandemonium of Baltimore,” where he is largely unknown.

Stevie Boi was born Steven Strawder. His mother was in the military and the family moved a lot. “I’ve been in every state, lived in so many different countries,” he says. “I have a unique cultural background.” When he was 16, his mother moved the family to Bel Air. A couple of years later, Boi got his own loft apartment in Baltimore, near Lexington Market, and painted all the walls black. “It’s very dark, kind of like a fairyland,” he says. “It’s where all the magic happens. I’m so inspired by all the crazy sounds of the city.”

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