We all know glasses change the way we look but in some cases they can really make the man (or woman!). John Lennon was instantly recognisable thanks to his round lens coloured Windsor style that are now much more commonly referred to as a Lennon. Apart from demonstrating the power of designer glasses in terms of style, that also illustrates the importance of the other component of contemporary celebrity the modern media. Lennon glasses could just as easily been called after Groucho Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, or Joseph Stalin, – they all wore the same style.
The movie Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as Lt Pete Maverick Mitchell and Kelly McGillis as Charlotte Charlie Blackwood with adequate support from Val Kilmer as Lt Tom Iceman Kazansky, launched several careers and fuelled many an adolescent fantasy, arguably the real stars though were the aviator sunglasses that adorned the cast in most of the movie. In the immediate aftermath of the screening, sales of this particular style took off a quickly as the F14 Tomcat jet fighters, which at the time were the zenith of US naval aviation. Aviator style shapes are also the preferred designer sunglasses of Cristiano Ronaldo and were the accessory of choice for the late king of pop, Michael Jackson.
Designer glasses are of course mainly about image, but sometimes that image doesnt need to be tremendously cool. What about the two Ronnies in their silly big specs which became so much a part of their show you just couldn’t imagine them without their glasses. Their glasses became easily as iconic and recognisable as those of Lennon or Cruise but in the case of the two Ronnies, the point was to make them look sillier and more geeky. Snooker player Dennis Taylor’s famous designer glasses had a distinctive, swivel-lens, upside-down design. They may have looked slightly odd, but they helped Taylor win the 1985 world snooker title. Perhaps the most unusual celebrity designer glasses wearer was comedy writer and performer Eric Sykes, who was never seen without his black horn rims. In fact there was nothing wrong with Sykes’ eyesight, instead the ‘glasses’ were merely a bone-conducting hearing aid, and contained no glass at all.