How Much Do Your Designer Glasses Say About Your Personality

We all know glasses change the way we look but in some cases they can really make the man (or woman!). John Lennon’s trademark round lenses were so recognisable that the style came to be named after him as the ‘Lennon’. This isn’t only a demonstration of how much glasses can influence a person’s image but also says something about 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. When the film aired sales of the aviator style specs soared with it, 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 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. They might have looked more than a little strange but there’s no question they helped him win the world snooked title in 1985. 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 his glasses never had any lenses in them, and were really a bone-resonating hearing aid.