20 Eyeglass Styles That Turned Necessity Into Fashion

In 1936, the US optical firm Bausch & Lomb produced teardrop sunglasses for US Army Air Corps pilots battling high-altitude glare. The glasses had a plastic frame and green lenses. In 1937, they went on sale in the US with a gold wire frame as Ray-Ban Aviators, but they only became popular in 1944, when widely published photographs of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Allied commander, wearing his gold Aviators while wading ashore in the Philippines made the style famous worldwide.

American silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd introduced the Glasses Character in his 1917 short film Over the Fence with a pair of round, thick horn-rimmed frames. Prior to Lloyd, films had used glasses primarily to convey that a character was weak, old, or studious. But Lloyd himself had perfect vision. He’d taken the lenses out of his frames altogether so he could avoid studio lights getting in the way while he did dangerous stunts like hanging off the side of a clock tower in Safety Last. His strong, young persona made horn-rimmed glasses popular throughout the ’20s.

Benjamin Franklin was an American statesman and scientist. In the 1780s, he was in France struggling with nearsightedness as well as farsightedness, changing between his two pairs of glasses at dinner parties. He grew weary of this practice and asked an optician to cut his distance and reading lenses in half and attach them to one pair of frames, the distance lenses on top, the reading lenses on the bottom. He described these double spectacles in a 1785 letter. Franklin didn’t call them bifocals. Optician John Isaac Hawkins coined that term in 1824.

Centuries before glasses had arms, glassworkers in northern Italy, near Pisa and Venice, fitted two magnifying lenses in wood or bone frames, joined by a single rivet at the nose bridge, between 1280 and 1300. The rivet spectacles had no arms, so you’d have to perch them on your nose or lift them up with your fingers. A Dominican monk called Alessandro della Spina taught people how to make them, though the identity of their originator has been lost to history.

In the mid-1930s, New York-based artist and window designer Altina Schinasi discovered that optical stores were selling nothing but round spectacles for women. Taking cues from Venetian carnival masks, she cut paper models of frames that curved up to the temples at the outer edge, which she called “Harlequin.” A Manhattan optical boutique began producing the frames in 1939. That year, Harlequins won a prominent industrial design prize.

In 1727, Edward Scarlett, a London optician who was an instrument maker to King George II, advertised a new kind of eyewear he called “Temple Spectacles,” with short, stiff metal arms on each side ending in flat rings. Men wore big, powdered wigs then, so instead of hooking over the ears, the arms rested flat against the temples on either side of the head. This helped keep the glasses in place while leaving hands free to read, walk, or work.

It’s hard to get much simpler than the monocle. A single circular piece of glass in a thin metal rim, the monocle was kept in position between the brow and cheekbone solely by facial muscles. The monocle had neither handle nor arms but did come with a cord attached to the wearer’s clothing that helped keep the monocle from being misplaced when it fell out. The monocle was worn by Prussian army officers, upper-class Englishmen, and thinkers and writers like Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde, starting in the early 1800s, and became a classic comic gag when it inevitably fell out in surprise.

The problem with rivet spectacles is that they fall off as soon as you move. In 17th-century Spain and Italy, the issue was solved by tying silk strings or ribbons through holes in the temples and passing them over the ears to suspend the glasses while walking. Spanish and Italian Jesuit missionaries brought these to Qing Dynasty China, and local makers added small lead balls to the ends of the strings so the loops hung evenly behind the ears.

The pince-nez, from the French for “pinch-nose,” connected two separate lenses with a flexible spring bridge that clamped over the cartilage of the nose, so no side arms were needed. These were first manufactured in America by Bausch & Lomb and others, made of hard vulcanized rubber, about the time of the Civil War. People often clipped a cord or chain to a lapel so they wouldn’t lose them. Famous wearers include President Theodore Roosevelt and playwright Anton Chekhov. They became the style of choice for politicians and businessmen between the 1880s and 1910.

Scissors spectacles had two lenses mounted at the ends of long stems, which were attached at a hinge in the middle, like a pair of scissors. The wearer simply lifted them up to read or see better, rather than wearing them all the time. They were carried by aristocrats who didn’t want to appear old and out of touch, or worse, vulgar, by wearing glasses all the time. George Washington owned a pair, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, though the former used silver reading glasses when he delivered his famous Newburgh Address in 1783. Those reading glasses were made by David Rittenhouse, an accomplished instrument maker.

Mahatma Gandhi, leader of India’s independence movement, is frequently pictured wearing round Windsor glasses. His frames had thin circular wire wrapped in dark celluloid, with a metal saddle bridge and thin cable temples which curved around his ears. Made with inexpensive materials, Windsor glasses were widely distributed through military units and public health programs during the 1910s, 20s and 30s, putting them within reach of ordinary people around the world.

James Ayscough was a London instrument maker who wrote a book in 1752 suggesting that regular clear lenses let in glare that made the eye hurt if it were already weak or diseased. He suggested that tinted lenses, such as blue or green glass, in double-hinged spectacle frames could soak up some of the glare and make tired eyes feel better. Ayscough’s prescription predated the discovery of ultraviolet radiation. He did not intend to protect the eye from sunlight but rather to make it more comfortable.

Folding spectacles were patented in 1783 by London optician Addison Smith. They consisted of an additional set of lenses that were hinged above the normal frame. The user could fold the lenses down onto the primary lenses when they wished to read, meaning the wearer only carried one frame rather than two different sets of glasses. They were kept in little cases of silver, papier-mâché or shagreen. The folding specs became popular with the traveling public, merchant mariners, and military officers from the 1780s to the 1880s as an option for carrying a more durable pair of reading glasses without added weight.

In response to a surge of factory eye injuries around the turn of the 20th century, Gile J. Willson and Dr. Thomas A. Willson founded a company in Reading, Pennsylvania, to produce industrial safety goggles. The safety goggles were made of hardened safety glass with a steel frame and leather or mesh side shields to prevent metal shavings and chemicals from entering the eye. Safety goggles became a tool for protection for ordinary workers rather than an adornment for the wealthy.

In the late 1930s, American optical firms Shuron Ltd. and Universal Optical introduced semi-rimless Numont and Shurset mountings. These anchored each lens to a thin metal bar tucked behind the glass at a single point near the bridge, protecting the lens from impact despite the lack of a full metal frame on the front. They were extremely popular for professional or corporate attire during the 1940s.

Before clip-on sunglasses, prescription sunglasses were too expensive for the average family to buy. From the 1930s to the 1950s, clip-on lenses, tinted glass attached with spring clips or hinges, clipped right over people’s prescription glasses. They could be flipped up or removed entirely when people went indoors. This enabled regular glasses to serve as sunglasses for driving or playing sports, and made it possible for everyday people to protect their eyes from the sun.

In a lorgnette, two spectacle lenses were mounted on the end of a long decorative handle instead of being fixed to the bridge of the nose. The lorgnette existed because 19th-century etiquette frowned on women wearing permanent glasses, seen back then as medical or just plain unfeminine. Instead, women could raise a lorgnette to their eyes for use at the opera or ballroom, then put it down once more. Lorgnettes were often crafted from gold, silver, tortoiseshell, or mother-of-pearl, prized as fashionable accessories as much as practical aids to vision.

In 1929, Edwin H. Land, a Harvard undergraduate who helped establish the Polaroid Corporation, received a patent for his invention of a synthetic sheet polarizer. By 1937, he was marketing polarized sunglasses. Regular tinted glasses only darken the visual field but do nothing to reduce blinding horizontal glare. Land’s lenses blocked this glare by using microscopic crystals embedded in a transparent plastic sheet to filter the reflected light from surfaces like water, snow, and highways. Land created practical eyewear for aviators, motorists and mariners.

In 1947, Jack Rohrbach, then a vice president of the American optical manufacturer Shuron Ltd., developed a browline frame he called “Ronsir” consisting of plastic upper caps resembling eyebrows mounted on a chassis of thin metal wire. By the 1950s, the browline was by far the most popular eyeglass style in America, accounting for about half of all prescription glasses sold that decade, including those donned by figures such as civil rights icon Malcolm X.

Ray-Ban optical designer Raymond Stegeman applied for a patent on a new frame in 1952 that didn’t resemble any other eyewear on the market. Its trapezoidal shape and flared temples were molded out of thick plastic. After critics began comparing the style to Cadillac tail fins and Eames chairs, the accessory was immortalized when actors and musicians like James Dean, Buddy Holly, and Roy Orbison began wearing it, cementing solid plastic frames as the quintessential symbol of midcentury cool.

This content was created with the help of AI.