More intimate than underpants precisely because they are plain for all to see, eyeglasses are no mere detail of costume. Acting as a mask that fuses with the features, glasses serve as a spotlight or a proscenium arch or a stage for the soul in the theater of everyday life. The bespectacled face asks the world to see it a certain way by telling the world something about how it is seen.
Practical people, choosing the unassuming oblong frames that are the plain vanilla of this realm, declare their contentment with presenting the illusion of a neutral perspective. But glasses have steadily evolved from strict practicality to become spectacles in themselves. The dominant models of the day are “library glasses,” with big lenses mounted in bold plastic frames made of cellulose acetate. On the face of a fashion executive about town, such glasses dare party photographers to ignore galactic glances designed to be seen. In postgame interviews, basketball stars flash frames that, whether fitted with prescription lenses or nonprescription lenses or no lenses at all, broadcast an eagerness to discuss strategy.
There is a generational swing in this motion away from the understated titanium frames — light and strong, hypoallergenic and uncorroding — that let baby boomers feel they were aging gracefully into reading fine print that had grown fuzzy. The low-key futurism of titanium, with its promise of better living through metallurgy, is out of step with the future that has arrived, where this foundational piece of wearable technology is styled to evoke a plastic past of indistinct vintage. People who wear large lenses are announcing that they do not share the cast of mind suggested by small lenses that pierce and finely peer. The little rimless numbers of the sort once favored by Steve Jobs are precision tools conspicuous only in the elegance with which they reject excess. The new glasses — outsize and omnivorous — reject that rejection.
Glasses have long been understood as signs of seriousness; this holds true for squarish metal rims bespeaking Midwestern plain-dealing and round owlish ones telegraphing bankerly diligence. The subgenre of seriousness now in vogue seems interrogatory to a combative degree. The assertive new glasses pre-empt the gibe of “four eyes” by saying, I know I am, but what are you? (...)
If we had to choose one moment when eyeglasses entered the gravitational field of fashion, it would be the day, early in the 1930s, that a Manhattan window dresser named Altina Sanders was bored by the dreary sameness of the wares displayed by a neighboring optician. When she filed a patent for a “new, original, ornamental design for a spectacle frame” that swept up at the corners, she had a harlequin mask in mind. The term “cat’s eye” caught on. The woman wearing them was never entirely without a smile.
When I visited the New York headquarters of the mostly online eyewear store Warby Parker, one of its founders showed me an old photo of Charlotte Rampling that served as the company’s muse and in-house icon. Behind lenses as large as coasters, grinning with a wholesome sense of mischief, the actress is glancing down a shoulder and out of the frame, warm with expectation. Warby Parker presents this picture to indicate not merely an ideal of design but also an incarnation of brand essence. The buzzwords are “approachable” and “accessible,” and the demeanor is a major mode of today’s eyeglasses: open and guileless and actively inquisitive, adventuresome as a critter out of Japanese animation.
The opposite face of the going style wears a glamorous glower. These glasses train a hard glare of sophistication, and they proudly invite admiring countersurveillance, and en masse they can be a bit much to bear. A nearsighted friend of mine has begun setting his acetate frames aside in self-contempt, not wanting to be part of a demographic that would have him as a member. But he wears them when coaching his son’s Little League team, an obligation that brings him into contact with adults from other cultural niches. They’ve got him pegged on the basis of his specs. Imagine a rival coach who has emerged from the white shell of an S.U.V. and a long gestation in an old school of machismo, and who says, with a socially acceptable jeer: “You know who you look like? Elvis Costello.” It’s certainly a more elegant formulation than “Die, yuppie scum.”
Practical people, choosing the unassuming oblong frames that are the plain vanilla of this realm, declare their contentment with presenting the illusion of a neutral perspective. But glasses have steadily evolved from strict practicality to become spectacles in themselves. The dominant models of the day are “library glasses,” with big lenses mounted in bold plastic frames made of cellulose acetate. On the face of a fashion executive about town, such glasses dare party photographers to ignore galactic glances designed to be seen. In postgame interviews, basketball stars flash frames that, whether fitted with prescription lenses or nonprescription lenses or no lenses at all, broadcast an eagerness to discuss strategy.There is a generational swing in this motion away from the understated titanium frames — light and strong, hypoallergenic and uncorroding — that let baby boomers feel they were aging gracefully into reading fine print that had grown fuzzy. The low-key futurism of titanium, with its promise of better living through metallurgy, is out of step with the future that has arrived, where this foundational piece of wearable technology is styled to evoke a plastic past of indistinct vintage. People who wear large lenses are announcing that they do not share the cast of mind suggested by small lenses that pierce and finely peer. The little rimless numbers of the sort once favored by Steve Jobs are precision tools conspicuous only in the elegance with which they reject excess. The new glasses — outsize and omnivorous — reject that rejection.
Glasses have long been understood as signs of seriousness; this holds true for squarish metal rims bespeaking Midwestern plain-dealing and round owlish ones telegraphing bankerly diligence. The subgenre of seriousness now in vogue seems interrogatory to a combative degree. The assertive new glasses pre-empt the gibe of “four eyes” by saying, I know I am, but what are you? (...)
If we had to choose one moment when eyeglasses entered the gravitational field of fashion, it would be the day, early in the 1930s, that a Manhattan window dresser named Altina Sanders was bored by the dreary sameness of the wares displayed by a neighboring optician. When she filed a patent for a “new, original, ornamental design for a spectacle frame” that swept up at the corners, she had a harlequin mask in mind. The term “cat’s eye” caught on. The woman wearing them was never entirely without a smile.
When I visited the New York headquarters of the mostly online eyewear store Warby Parker, one of its founders showed me an old photo of Charlotte Rampling that served as the company’s muse and in-house icon. Behind lenses as large as coasters, grinning with a wholesome sense of mischief, the actress is glancing down a shoulder and out of the frame, warm with expectation. Warby Parker presents this picture to indicate not merely an ideal of design but also an incarnation of brand essence. The buzzwords are “approachable” and “accessible,” and the demeanor is a major mode of today’s eyeglasses: open and guileless and actively inquisitive, adventuresome as a critter out of Japanese animation.
The opposite face of the going style wears a glamorous glower. These glasses train a hard glare of sophistication, and they proudly invite admiring countersurveillance, and en masse they can be a bit much to bear. A nearsighted friend of mine has begun setting his acetate frames aside in self-contempt, not wanting to be part of a demographic that would have him as a member. But he wears them when coaching his son’s Little League team, an obligation that brings him into contact with adults from other cultural niches. They’ve got him pegged on the basis of his specs. Imagine a rival coach who has emerged from the white shell of an S.U.V. and a long gestation in an old school of machismo, and who says, with a socially acceptable jeer: “You know who you look like? Elvis Costello.” It’s certainly a more elegant formulation than “Die, yuppie scum.”
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Marilyn Monroe, 20th Century Fox
