Few accessories come as loaded with meaning as sunglasses. Some make you look sinister, others comical. Some impart a deadly seriousness, others an offbeat ease. Some bestow an iconic cool, others a passé naffness. Should the fine equilibrium between weight of frame and shape of lens be out just one iota, the whole structure is, in the eye of the beholder, compromised. Should the arms be a hair’s breadth too thick, or the pattern of the tortoiseshell a tad too clotted, you might as well go bare-faced. Yet when everything’s right, a pair of shades can deliver the kind of authoritative hit other accoutrements only dream about. So you can be sure the decision as to what eyewear Barack Obama should wear during his US presidential campaign wasn’t left to chance. It simply had to be Ray-Bans.
CELEBRITIES LIKE JACK NICHOLSON AND TOM CRUISE WEAR RAY-BANS
I can’t think of another brand that’s adorned the features of so many stars, celebrities, and public figures. Existentially enigmatic, Ray-Ban Wayfarers were worn in the ‘50s and ‘60s by Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Bob Dylan, John F Kennedy, Andy Warhol, and John Lennon. In the ‘80s, the likes of Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and Jack Nicholson cloaked their profiles in the style too. In the words of design critic Stephen Bayley, the “distinctive trapezoidal frame spoke a non-verbal language that hinted at unstable dangerousness, but one nicely tempered by the sturdy arms.” Meanwhile, Ray-Ban Aviators have been favored by the likes of Madonna, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Knoxville, and Kanye West. For me, the wide expanses of typically reflective lens, two or three times the area of the eye socket, provide the perfect concealment for those of a Garboesque disposition.
On the back of The Blues Brothers, I got my first pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers back in the ‘80s. Granted, I never carried them off with the same raffish panache as John Belushi. But they screened me from the mundanity of much of my everyday life. And, I like to think, bestowed me with at least a little of their exotic modernism.
No comments:
Post a Comment