Beauty and Fashion Blog

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. Sales of this style soared in the wake of the film’s release as the F14 Tomcat jet fighters, which at the time were the zenith of US naval aviation. Aviator style shapes are also the preferred dseigner 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 doesn’t need to be tremendously cool. You only have to look as far as the two Ronnies with their horn rim specs which were all the logo their show really needed. 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. Those glasses helped Taylor win the world snooker title, even if they did look a bit strange. One of the more bizarre pairs of glasses worn by a celebrity were the trademark horn rimmed specs of comedian Eric Sykes. In fact his glasses never had any lenses in them, and were really a bone-resonating hearing aid.