Sunglasses

Well, I moved to California from Ohio. The year was 1973, and Dr. Oppenheimer had just moved to L.A. I was in a little teeny office on Hollywood and Vine. And one day, somebody came in my office and said, are you an eye doctor? And I said, yes. He said, well, can you help me? This stranger had a problem. It turned out he was a Hollywood producer and he was working on a scene where there would be an image of a letter that was blurry and would become clear as the actor put on glasses.

He figured he would go across the street and ask the local eye doctor how to do it. I said, well, that's really easy to do. He said, well, can you come over and talk to the cinematographer? So I went across the street. I talked to the cinematographer. Told him, it's very simple. All you do is this, this, this, and this. So he said, oh, thank you so much. What's your name? And so Dr. Steven Oppenheimer became the eye doctor that the movie people called. And not just for camera tricks.

About six months later, I had my own office. We got a call one day. It was this guy. He said, I've been looking for you. I got a problem. I got to get a pair of glasses for Kate Jackson. And I said, who's that? Kate Jackson, Charlie's Angels.

Kate Jackson wanted a pair of glasses so that she could walk out and go to the grocery store and not be recognized. But why couldn't they just go to, you know, a sunglasses hut? Well, you don't know how Hollywood works. There wasn't a sunglass hut in those days. So he said, you got to come out to the studio and please bring some glasses. So I put some sunglasses in the case and I went to the studio. It started with the TV shows with Kate Jackson, soon thereafter Farrah Fawcett.

And then eventually, Dr. Oppenheimer was procuring and fitting the sunglasses for Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Faye Dunaway. He did several movies for Stallone. He did Beetlejuice, and extremely notably, Dr. Oppenheimer put Tom Cruise in those Ray-Bans for risky business. This side job putting sunglasses on the stars got so successful that Dr. Oppenheimer had to hire a second doctor to take over at the practice because Dr. Oppenheimer was on set.

I met Dr. Oppenheimer in a tiny conference room in Virginia Beach where about a dozen eye doctors, a few supportive spouses, and one podcaster were all gathered for the annual meeting of the Ocular Heritage Society. Dr. Oppenheimer talked about how he put Hollywood stars in some of the most iconic shades of the 1970s and 80s. And another doctor showed off his vast collection of pince-nez. Another presenter gave an elaborate presentation speculating about Winston Churchill's eyeglasses.

These were the true geeks of the eyewear world. These were the appreciators of all optical accessories. But if you happen to be at that Holiday Inn, watching us as we shuffled out for sandwiches between talks... You would. Have no idea. But the glasses you're wearing, where are these from? They're probably 10, 15 years old. I don't like to change.

That's so funny. Everybody is keeping it fairly conservative. You would never know that this was a group of eyewear nerds. All of these optometrists, yes, even Hollywood's own Dr. Oppenheimer, were all wearing simple... understated, mostly wire frames. And they claim to know nothing of fashion. I had a patient who came in and she said, these are Mewmow or Mow Mows. I had to look at them. Mewmew. Mewmew. I didn't know.

Yet, at the same time, when Dr. Cheryl Mitchell's patient brought in these fancy Mew Mew glasses, Dr. Mitchell immediately was like, oh, this looks like a pair of antique Chinese spectacles that I have in my own private nerdy collection.

But the design and the way the frames are cut, they're Chinese spectacles. And she said, oh, really? I didn't know that. There's an interest in fashion among everybody here. Most of us here, it's not fashion. Most of it, it's history, to be honest with it. History and the science of vision.

Yeah, it's history, but fashion is cyclical. And so if you know about the history of glasses, it gives you a leg up on eyewear trends going forward, which is exactly how Dr. Oppenheimer was able to move from fitting glasses on movie stars. to actually designing glasses for them. I designed the glasses. I had them made up. It's just so amazing that you knew about the style. That's basically costume design. That's because I collected antiques.

eye glasses for many years. Dr. Oppenheimer accidentally found himself in the business of cutting-edge fashion. But honestly, all of these eye doctors did. Like, these ophthalmologists and optometrists simply... have to think about style.

whether they like it or not. Fashion dictates what we've got to sell. Dr. John Dixon Salt was visiting from the British counterpart, the Ophthalmic Antiques International Collectors Club. That's the fashion, that's what they must have. I'm kind of shocked that medically minded. people are so taken by fashion in this way. Well, it's forced on us. Yes, fashion is forced upon

All of us, really. But I wager to say there hasn't been a medical device that has fallen prey to fashion's whims quite in the same way as has happened with glasses. And particularly sunglasses. I mean, having stylish glasses actually becomes a medical necessity. Don't take my word for it. Listen to my very own eye doctor. The fashion aspect there is key. Because if it doesn't look good, you're not going to wear it.

I learned this the hard way because I found out that I have to wear this fashion accessory. And I don't understand how something like that happens. After the break. I was just telling a group of people about Radiotopia the other day and I almost started crying. Radiotopia is how I'm able to make this show. Radiotopia is a podcast distribution network. What that means is that... This is how the show makes money. This is how I eat and pay my rent. Radiotopia.

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I don't wear glasses, so I actually had never been to an eye doctor until my mid-30s when I was like, I guess I'm aging and should go get my eyes checked. So I went to this local eye doctor here in Brooklyn named Dr. Bazan.

So it's important to remember, even if you're seeing great, you want to make sure that your eyes are healthy. So I'm happy that you were here. In my hubris, I was like, this should be pretty uneventful. Just like, show me the eye chart. I see just fine. But Dr. Bazan... did a scan of my eye and told me that I sort of did need to start wearing glasses every day.

Sunglasses. It's important to be aware that you need to have your sunglasses when you step outside and you're gonna be in the sun for more than 15-20 minutes regardless of the season. If I'm ever gonna be outside at all for more than 15 minutes... I don't know. Okay, so the whites of your eyes had a little spot of yellow on there. That little spot of yellow is early signs of sun damage. It's called the pingwecula. It's like a tiny bump.

on the surface of my eye this little bump is raised so the tears don't do a great job of coating it and it's exposed to the environment and that's where irritation can take place if you don't use sunglasses it will get worse how common is this It's super common, especially people that grow up in sunny places and don't have sun protection on. I wouldn't say that I grew up in a particularly sunny place, but it is true.

that I never really wore sunglasses. I was like, what's the point? I'm just going to lose them. Besides, it's fine, I'll just squint. And now I have developed a sensitive little pinwacula that I have to protect, which means I have to get into the habit of wearing sunglasses.

and like decent quality ones. But you usually want to make sure that you're not buying them off the street. You're buying them at your eye doctor or a reputable brand. It's important that sunglasses actually have UV protection because dark lenses that don't have UV protection make your pupils dilate. So they actually let in.

more UV light. Basically wearing bad sunglasses is worse than wearing no sunglasses. Everybody should be wearing sunglasses. Is this like just kind of general advice you give to everyone? Yes. I thought I was special. I'm not special, and neither is my pinguacula. And so, on doctor's orders, I found myself in the market for sunglasses. But then...

As luck would have it, a very friendly branding person named Charlotte cold emailed me to invite me to some new glasses shop of some company I'd never heard of before. And I was like, hmm. I wonder if they'll give me sunglasses. We're British brands. I was like, okay. We actually have 18 stores in the UK. And this is our second in New York. Tom, our founder, is in the back. So I'll introduce you as well. Okay. This is Tom. I don't know if you were planning on working right now. No.

No, it's cool. We don't have to talk. Do you wear glasses? I don't. Okay. Well, one day you will. And with that portention of doom, I met the founder of the glasses company Qubits, Tom Broughton. When you get to about 40, 45, the front of your...

cornea hardens, and then you need reading glasses for the first time. Tom, however, started wearing glasses young. I was like 14, 15. I was like, where's the frame that Jarvis Cocker wears? Where's the frame that Morrissey wears? Then I got into vintage frames in my 20s and collected a lot of them. And they've got amazing design history glasses. So many design elements of glasses, even the choices that seem

purely aesthetic were designed from a place of practicality. And a lot of the origins of frames comes from the lenses. Like some of the earliest glasses were perfectly round circles because when the lenses were made with heavy mineral glass a little round eye was easiest to cut. But in the 30s, it was decided that the optimum shape for eye movement was something called the Panto. Which is short for pantoscopic, but it's a little bit wider at the top because how an eyeball moves with...

within the socket. So when your eyeball moves, it moves in like a T-shape. Or even little details like what's called a keyhole bridge, like when glasses have those jaunty little cutaways from the nose bridge. That was a kind of invention from post-war when they didn't... have access to materials so they couldn't make new frames. So to get a frame to fit they would literally cut a bit away.

So it could fit on a... On different noses. Yeah, so a lot of the design features that we see now were born out of necessity, as ever. And it might seem clear that that necessity is to protect our eyes from the sun.

But in early versions of sunglasses, they weren't really about sun protection. There's a person you should speak to called Neil Handley who runs the College of Optometry in London. He runs this because he's one of the very few optical museums in the world. Tom raved about this cool place called the British Optical Association Museum at the College of Optometrists in London. How big is the collection?

Well, we have around 28,000 catalogued items in the collection, and the collection is growing by approximately 700 or 800 items per year. And in the collection that Dr. Neil Handley... overseas, there are a number of early forerunners to the modern sunglasses. For example, there are these Inuit eye covers. They're made out of bone and they have slits over the eyes and if you look through those slits, it cuts out glare from the sun.

which is very helpful for vision and making it easier to see in the snow. But those aren't... Glasses, per se. Because they don't have any form of lens in them, they're not really part of the history of spectacles. Okay, but in 12th century China, judges wore tinted glasses to hide their eyes. Judges would wear dark lenses so you couldn't...

detect what they were deliberating about. But that wasn't about sun protection. Now, at the same time, in parallel to that, you have the history of what we would now call protective eyewear. to guard the eyes as a protective barrier from all sorts of things, including the wind, from dust.

from stray fragments if you're operating a tool, for example, or chopping wood. There were also special glasses that were meant to protect the eyes while you were, say, riding on a train, which could leave you at the mercy of smoke and dust and debris and wind. But these were sort of like a cross between goggles and glasses. And these things could have tinted lenses, which could guard against glare.

but they're not necessarily protection against the sun as we would understand it. So sunglasses are in fact a relatively modern concept. And even still, some of the earliest examples of what we would now call sunglasses were only for very specialized patients.

But the first person who ever made sunglasses was in 1780-something. At the time, in the 18th century in Britain, there was a big problem with syphilis. Someone please hire me to do a special series on syphilis. So much comes back to syphilis. One of the symptoms of syphilis being... light hypersensitivity and tinted lenses alleviate the conditions of syphilis. I just think there's something quite ironic that this bastion of fashion has its roots in venereal disease.

Although it's also a little fitting. Like in the 1780s, if you saw someone in tinted glasses, you'd be like, that guy fucks. Syphilis would lead to scarring of the front surface of the eye, making your eyes both weak and sensitive.

Dark lenses might be very necessary then. But also because there was the disfiguring effect. Right, these glasses were also to hide the outward effects of syphilis. Similarly to how dark glasses were worn to hide eyes from onlookers, if you were, say... blind so again not entirely about the sun so sunglasses are in fact a relatively modern concept the name sunglasses as in glasses that protect from the sun

doesn't really arrive until the 1890s. And one way they come on the scene is through the popularization of new kinds of sports. Alpine sports like skiing and hiking and other stuff in the snow was really hard to do with a parasol or a big hat. And they started to wear spectacles with tinted lenses. Mostly to be able to see in the bright snow. So these are the first sunglasses.

and they often made them locally in workshops. That was mostly a European movement. Stateside, sunglasses were starting to be worn in our sports. One of those was American baseball. The press reported when they weren't wearing their dark glasses and therefore missed catching the ball. And let's say you wanted to go see some of this American baseball or wanted to participate in one of these mountain sports.

heard so much about. You might have to take a multi-week transatlantic boat trip, in which case you'll have to pack the sunglasses you bought last winter in St. Moritz, darling. They start to be used for new social pursuits such as going across the ocean. and an ocean liner and reclining on the sun deck. And this part is sort of obvious, but as we roll into the end of the 19th century, in industrializing countries, sunlight becomes a luxury.

Something once loathed and avoided by agricultural workers is now out of reach to the pasty factory worker. And so... This sense of luxury was apparent in the actual sunglasses. for sunglasses. On the more practical side, there were many expensive, unsustainable materials like tortoise shell, maybe inlaid with mother of pearl. You get the crossover between the work of the optician, the spectacle maker, and the jeweler.

And so some of these things will be purchased from jewelry shops. But I think we all know that just because something might be expensive, that does not make it cool. Those are two different things. Like even when sunglasses started to be cheaper and made of plastic, they were still niche. been a minority interest if you had gone to a beach you would have spotted that the majority of the people on that beach would not have been wearing sunglasses so what about sunglasses makes them so

Cool. I mean, that is the emoji for cool. A smiley face wearing sunglasses. It's a phenomenon. And somebody actually got their doctorate from studying that very concept. There's actually a PhD thesis was written on sunglasses and the concept of cool.

That thesis was written by Vanessa Brown. I'm based in the Department of Fashion and Textiles in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. Vanessa Brown also turned her thesis into a book called Cool Shades, The History and Meaning of Sunglasses. She basically explores how these things became the forever flag bearer of cool.

The whole point of things that are cool is that they quickly become uncool. And yet, somehow or the other, they just didn't seem to lose that status. So I thought, here's a thing that's so resilient to the idea of perennial change, that there must be some... And lo and behold, there are many interesting things about this. Sunglasses became the manifestation of coolness based on a few key factors that all happened at the same time.

But all of these reasons were only barely related to the sun. Like, actually, there was a line of thought that maybe sunglasses were just a cool accessory that were bad for your eyes. In the journals... In the first half of the 20th century, most of the discussion is about how people shouldn't be wearing sunglasses because actually...

Eyes are equipped with the ability to adjust to light anyway. So there's a lot of warning about people wearing sunglasses too much, too often in the wrong settings. Sunglasses were much less about the sun. and much more about the stars. By the end of the 1930s, the connection with celebrity is the main thing, making people want sunglasses. Sunglasses became something that every movie star had on their person.

And the assumption is, and this would be a natural assumption, this must be because these people are out in California, where it's sunny. That's what I assumed. In reality, these photographs are taken in the studio. A lot of these on-set candidates were taken by the movie studios and put in magazines to promote the star and the movie they were working on. So it's quite nice to have these images of people when they weren't actually being...

filmed and so in these sort of sanctioned behind the scenes pictures that the movie studios would make stars always had their sunglasses on but this was a way of ensuring that they still looked okay like they didn't look tired or they didn't have their makeup off or whatever. So some quite odd pictures of celebrities in sunglasses eating their lunch in a trailer. Looking glamorous in their cultivated mystique. There's a huge growth in the sale of sunglasses encouraged by film stars.

And then when the paparazzi became a thing, the need for sunglasses became even greater. The technology that those paparazzi used was quite violent. They didn't have long zoom lenses, so they would have to sort of like jump out of a bush at you, explode. The flash bulb shatters and it would actually be quite an alarming thing to happen. And the alarm was, of course, the point.

They would quite like this because they would get pictures of celebrities looking shocked. Sunglasses were more than just a disguise. They were a way to hide any shock that might happen. There was no way to read the emotions. Hidden. behind this self-imposed shield that the glasses provided. And you can control how much of you is seen. Which is part of the reason why jazz musicians started wearing sunglasses. indoors at night at the club.

at least according to the sociologist Howard Becker, who famously studied jazz musicians. Howard S. Becker interviewed a load of jazz men. He said that they developed all sorts of behaviours so that they wouldn't have to make eye contact with the audience. That's because a lot of their audiences were white and not very cool at all.

Miles Davis probably did not want to invite eye contact with one of his dorky white fans who'd be like, hey, can you play? She'll be coming around the mountain. You know, when I was growing up, DJs would do this. They'd like their headphones on. Like, I can't hear you. because they don't want to play the thing that you are going to request. In a smoky mid-century jazz club, sunglasses were protection for the artist.

It allowed the musician to communicate with his higher muses, to transcend the crowd. And there's something really quintessentially jazz about this. It really is about being at one with your instrument and being self-possessed. Also, many of these musicians were on drugs. It would be easy for people to tell that they were. Taking heroin. No need to show any dilated pupils here, just keeping it low-key.

So sunglasses get associated with drugs, sex, jazz, a fast-paced lifestyle that doesn't accommodate hats and parasols, and cars that kick up dust, and sports played outside, and lounging on ship decks looking like a movie star. Sunglasses are just cool. Even sunglasses that aren't...

cool per se, like the flashy novelty sunglasses that are shaped like animals or hearts or suns. Are these kinds of novelty sunglasses, can they be considered cool? Most people would probably have said no, because they're kitsch. Coolness is really silly. But Vanessa Brown insists that even those corny sunglasses were rebellious in their way. They were a statement of radical frivolity. Radical frivolity is a kind of...

Absolute commitment to pleasure. The antithesis of the thrifty, Protestant, judicious housewife, the antithesis of that, also an antithesis of good taste, understatement. And, and, and, and, at the same time sunglasses were cool and rarefied, they were starting to become essential to normal, everyday people in normal, everyday circumstances. And again,

not exactly because of the sun. It struck me that your overarching thesis was that although sunglasses are named for the sun, in the modern age, they are way more about other people. Absolutely. I think that the major function that sunglasses have is in mediating the gaze.

Of course, humans have used all kinds of objects to protect themselves from the eyes of others. Before sunglasses became this kind of gaze mediator, there were other things that people used. A fan that flittered over the face, a parasol that cast a shadow over the eye.

a hat brim that could be pulled down low. Newspapers, cigarettes even. A thing that you can look involved in your own world. You're not bothered by anybody else. This purpose is also served by your big headphones or the mask over your mouth. mouth or your gaze on your phone. These are what sociologist Irving Goffman called involvement shields. How great is that term? Involvement shields. These are little tools of distractions which

in urban life become vital. George Zimmel, who was a German sociologist, said over a hundred years ago that just living in an urban environment brought so many risks where there's so much potentially unwelcome interaction and information that people would likely have too responses. One, they would become a nervous wreck or they would become blasé. So sunglasses are really critical here because

They've emerged as a really useful tool to help you look blasé even if you feel like a nervous wreck. So I think this is part of the reason that sunglasses have remained such a popular... signifier in visual culture because this is a part of coolness that it becomes especially valuable. So valuable that companies quickly looked to bottle this feeling and sell it.

One of the really early reviews of the Ray-Ban, the reviewer initially describes himself as sceptical about the need for sunglasses, says that when he tries them... Behind the Ray-Ban glass, one experiences a coolness only to be described as delicious. Mmm. Ray-Bans. So delicious that they have become the Coca-Cola of the eyes. If you ask 100 people on the street to name glasses brands, they'll be like Ray-Ban. After the break.

the one company that makes almost all the sunglasses. I'm like, yeah, it's Ray-Ban, but I'm not actually talking about Ray-Ban. I'm talking about the company behind Ray-Ban. the company that makes the vast majority of eyewear in the world, even when it seems like we have so many choices.

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I'm in the East Village in front of Fabulous Fannies, waiting for Tom. Tom Broughton, the founder of the company Qubits, invited me to meet him in a different glasses store called Fabulous Fannies. I want to warn you I'm live. This is a destination for vintage frames and niche brands. I watched as Tom.

was all but salivating over a pair of sunglasses that looked like two clinking glasses of brandy, complete with clear ice cubes. Ice cubes in the tent. Tom admitted that sure, even though he loves and collects novelty eyewear and makes a lot of fun.

wacky frames himself, he probably wouldn't wear sunglasses like this. He actually doesn't wear sunglasses at all. I don't have any sunglasses. You don't believe in them? No, I do believe in them. They're nice, but I wear glasses all the time. Tom wears his eyeglasses, which are clear.

but they have UV protection. So you actually don't need dark shades for protection from the sun. It's independent of the tint. The shade of the lens is mostly just to reduce the strain on your eye. So sunglasses don't have to be any particular shade. There's a lot of variety that's possible in sunglasses. And there, at Fabulous Fanny's, I was bombarded with a ton of wild-looking designs from many supposedly iconic eyewear companies that I had

never heard of before. Like, for example, Cutler and Gross. Cutler and Gross is one of the reasons I fell in love with glasses. They made Jarvis Cocker's chunky glasses. And then there's Kazal. So Kazal have got actually a fascinating history. Kazal was a West German company that made these sensible frames for German bankers until Run DMC started wearing them. But it got associated with New York hip-hop culture. Not to mention the Kazal Boys with their 1985 single Snatching Kazals.

But a pioneering eyewear brand that looms quite large both for Tom and for sunglasses in general is a much older brand called Oliver Goldsmith. So like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany, she's wearing an Oliver Goldsmith. The Breakfast at Tiffany sunglasses are a model that Oliver Goldsmith still makes today. The model is called Manhattan, even though the company is British, as you can hear in the accent of fourth generation goldsmith, Claire Goldsmith.

Claire Goldsmith wasn't there designing Audrey Hepburn's glasses. But her family was. Her great-grandfather started Oliver Goldsmith in 1926, and then Claire's grandfather took over the company. And then just by chance, he changed eyewear forever. We were based in Soho, central London, and it was quite a manufacturing area at the time. And next door to us was a manufacturer of clothing.

And they made buttons. And these buttons were being made out of a revolutionary new material called plastic. Not easy to get hold of. You couldn't get it. It was the late 1930s. Claire's grandfather cut a deal with the owner of this factory and gave him some spectacle frames in exchange for some sheets of plastic. And this plastic was actually very boring. It was like this bland beige color. It's a very nude kind of color.

they were. A little insipid. But he took this plastic and turned it into a pair of pinkish beige plastic glasses. And he named those glasses Dawn. Dawn, exactly. The dawn of plastic. It really was a pivotal moment for eyewear being able to transcend into fashion. Fashion meaning like something that goes in and out of style, that you change with the seasons or with your handbag or your outfit. Because not only was plastic cheap, it was extremely subject to trend.

Because plastic allows you to introduce color into the story. Again, Dr. Neil Handley of the British Optical Association Museum at the College of Optometrists in London. Instead of brown and gray. i wear you have red green blue yellow and you can start to mix and match spectacle frames to coordinate with your wardrobe A great excuse to go shopping. And what we did get was the introduction from the 1950s onwards of...

Brand names that didn't originate as optical brands. Brands that had no experience designing eyewear. So I'm talking about fashion houses. Take, for example, the iconic mini dress designer, Mary Quant, who designed a line of big, colorful glasses. 1973. The Mary Quant sunglasses.

were actually very poorly fitting. Who would have guessed designing eyeglasses is a completely separate art from designing clothes. Eyewear design is more specific and exacting than I can reasonably attempt to describe on a podcast. So suffice to say...

For her next range of glasses in 1974, Mary Quant handed the reins over to an actual optometrist. And that was a much more commercially successful range. And so when Dior wanted to have some sunglasses, they turned to none other than Oliver Goldsmith. They didn't make glasses, so they just asked us to make them some. The fashion house paid the optical company to make glasses.

Great. This is how the industry worked, and it was pretty straightforward, right? Fashion houses reach out to glasses manufacturers and ask to make their lines of eyewear and sunglasses. Until one optical company completely flipped this approach. Beginning in the late 80s,

This eyewear manufacturer began approaching fashion houses and paying them. They went to Armani and said, hey, we would like to make glasses with your brand on and we'll give you some money for every pair we sell. And Armani said, yeah, OK, why not? And that was the first eyewear license. And the whole industry of eyewear licensing stems from that. That innovative Italian eyewear company was called Luxottica.

And after the Armani deal, Luxottica eventually started to license other brands, including Ralph Lauren, Tiffany's, Prada, Burberry, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace Vogue, and many, many, many, many more. Today, Luxottica designs and makes the eyewear for over a hundred... And you may see these names on the shelves in an optical practice and think that they are.

rival products from different manufacturers, but you may well find many of them are made by the same company in the same factory. Luxottica is the biggest one, but there are a few other players in the sunglasses licensing game, like Markolin, which has agreements with Guess and Adidas, and then there's Safalo, which has Levi's and Under Armour, and there's Marchion, who licensed Chloe and Lacoste and Calvin Klein.

And basically all of these brand affiliations turned sunglasses into affordable luxuries, like lipstick or perfume. A way to capture a bit of brand magic. It was the days when, do you remember when you used to have like Armani or whatever emblazoned across your chest? Logomania, Logomania.

Luxottica was churning out hundreds of new designs for dozens of well-known brands. And Oliver Goldsmith could not compete. Big brands were what people wanted. Us being a British... handcrafted little independent eyewear company just wasn't what people wanted so the company shut down and then shortly after oliver goldsmith shut down a major factor in sunglasses emerged

which is the actual freaking sun. The 1980s brings a new rise in budget airlines and hotels and a proliferation of sunbathing. The ozone layer, which had been slowly getting depleted over the course of the 1970s, was now weaker at protecting against UV light. And people found out about this because melanoma was killing people.

According to a 2021 study from the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, since 1981, skin cancer rates have increased by 550% in men and 250% in women. It's with our understanding about UV. people start thinking about sun protection. That's Vanessa Brown again, author of the book Cool Shades. It really isn't until the 90s that you see emphasis on the sun as a source of calm in the way these things are marketed.

Sunglasses actually become a medical device. It's more like going full circle because they absolutely were protective devices in origin. Dr. Neil Handley would like to remind you that sunglasses

really started as goggles, and then after a long life as a fashion accessory, they became protective again. Yes, it was only in relatively recent times, within my lifetime, that medical regulations were enforced it was around 1992 that there was legislation passed in the united kingdom to ensure that all sunglass lenses were

compliant with British standards, which have since been incorporated within international ISO standards. Apparently, Australia may have introduced UV standards as early as the 70s, but back then, sunglasses technology wasn't protective enough yet. But it is one useful warning to consumers today. If they want to wear vintage sunglasses, they should be aware that the lenses may not meet modern safety requirements.

The UV filtration has to do with the coating on lenses and the way it's applied, and it turned this fashion accessory into a necessity for living on Earth. UV on the short term can cause sunburns to our eyes. That is once again my own eye doctor, Dr. Bazan. It's called photokeratitis. Inside the eye, the sun causes cataract formation.

Sunlight becomes another danger to add to the litany of dangers of everyday existence. And so, the act of simply walking out into the sun now takes on a sense of risk. Which makes it... The risk from the sun. Sunglasses are a way of kind of demonstrating that you're really cool.

But at the same time, you're protecting yourself against the dangers of doing these things by having this particular sun cream, these particular sunglasses. What a testament to sunglasses coolness, right? That they stayed cool even after they became a safety device. This will never happen with bike helmets. So the sunglasses market now expanded to include kind of everyone on the planet. Like now we were all supposed to wear them for our health.

And so, in a very shrewd move, in 1995, Luxottica acquired lenscrafters. LensCrafters, the largest eyewear retail chain in North America. In this episode of 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl really took Luxottica to task for price fixing. I asked LensCrafters president Mark Weichel. How many non-Luxotica brands do you sell here? We probably have a few brands that are not Luxotica. Mostly Luxotica? Mostly Luxotica, yeah.

Leslie Stahl, you icon. Luxottica also owns Sunglass Hut, the largest sunglass chain in the world. And in a sunglass hut, you will find brands that Luxottica has outright purchased over the years. like Oakley and Ray-Ban. And Ray-Ban is the top-selling sunglass brand in the world. Ray-Bans used to be made by the American optical firm Bausch & Loam, which had fallen on hard times and was bought by Luxottica in 1999. And so Ray-Bans...

by their very ubiquity and availability, became the sunglasses to wear. Ray-Ban! Ray-Ban! That would be my biggest gripe in life is just seeing every man and his dog wearing Ray-Ban. Sunglasses became less of a statement. Like if everyone was supposed to be wearing them, they didn't have to be as stylish anymore. Don't you think it's just the industry's got more boring over time?

People just started playing it safe. Do you think, like, everything got boring because of Luxottica? Like, is it all... A little, don't you think?

And so, of course, there was the backlash to Luxottica. The startups and the direct-to-consumer brands arrived, offering cheaper frames, and a new wave of designers began to push aesthetic boundaries, like Tom Broughton started Qubits, and Claire Goldsmith revived the family business. and relaunched Oliver Goldsmith in 2005. It was received so warmly. When I kind of went back out to the market and I said, oh, Oliver Goldsmith, back. There was still a lot of...

People that remembered it. But then the younger generation immediately picked up on the references. And it's not just about the style of these things. There is a quality difference that matters in sunglasses. Even the plastic-looking ones. Like... I didn't know this. Did you know that acetate is made with cotton?

Cellulose acetate is made from cotton and they mix it with plasticizers that form this kind of jelly in sheets. When the jelly becomes firm, they peel these big sheets and they hang them in huge drying rooms. And the drying... process is so important and it cannot be rushed, right? And it's certainly easier to monitor quality control when you make fewer frames.

And so when my new sunglasses arrived, custom cut and fitted to my face, I enjoyed the soothing weight of the thick acetate resting on my ears. I appreciate the smooth way the arms hinge up and down. The way the lenses fully cover my eyes. And I appreciate the little shield they make for me in the world. I no longer think it's silly to wear sunglasses inside or on the subway. I think it's okay that they're also about style.

It's built into them. And it's something the optometrists have made peace with. I mean, they're functional. I mean, they're functional in fashion. Thank you so much to Dr. Drew Miller and everyone at the Ocular Heritage Society for letting me crash their annual meeting. It was actually a blast.

Special thanks also to Dr. Neil Handley, who was actually there at the meeting. And thanks as well to Tom Broughton and everyone at Qubits for being the ones to send me down this rabbit hole. Also, thanks to Rachel Cohen and Jess Lunning and Sayre Cavado.

This script was edited by the one and only Alison Berenger. Thank you, Alison. And if you'd like to see pictures of my cool new sunglasses, as well as images of what some old precursors to sunglasses look like, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com. Okay. More next month. I promised you'd get to hear a sneak preview of IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.

The series is called The Look, and it examines Michelle Obama's legacy as a fashion icon in and outside of the White House. I'll play you a clip now, and in this segment, you'll hear a snippet of a conversation between Michelle Obama and African-American literature professor Farrah Jasmine Griffin.

Moderated by Project Runway host and editor-in-chief of Elle, Nina Garcia. Okay, here it comes. You can listen to all four parts of the Look series by searching for IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson wherever you listen to podcasts. Farrah, I'm going to come and completely change tacks here. You said because the term lady has historically been denied.

Black women. Some believe that Black First Lady to be an oxymoron. What do you mean by that? Because I am sure a lot of people felt that way. Well, lady was a term that was, you know, had so much meaning instilled in it. And it was racial meaning. It was a class meaning, right? A certain kind of upper class white. woman, and we're not talking about Britain where it's a status, but here that Black women were not ladies. They were women, but they were not ladies. They were even...

years before Black women would be married, Black women would be called Mrs., right? So the idea of a first lady being a Black woman or a woman of any color other than a white woman was just... An anathema, like, what does that mean? They couldn't even imagine it, right? And so for Mrs. Obama to step into that role...

for many people, was just like the sun falling out of the sky. It just did not make sense to them at all. And for some of them, there was a kind of hostility about that. And for others, I think it was just something that they had to get used to. They had to grow into that. You know, we've adopted the term first lady for the women who are the wives of pastors, like Black culture has adopted that term. But for the general culture, I think that for some people, not all.

But for some people, there was real resistance because we've got this long history that Black women are women, but they are not ladies. I think, thankfully, our kids have had more freedom, more opportunities. They take so much for granted. They do. And it really wasn't that long ago. My mother's generation, my grandmothers, these are people that this generation of kids, they know, they knew.

But that's where history, and one of the reasons why Farrah's forward, you know, when I did this book, I knew I wanted, and I knew Farrah in particular could put the sociological, historical... impact context, which I think is so important because we are in a battle now of who gets to define history in a way that intentionally.

keeps a lot of this stuff out. So the next generation of kids don't even know that it exists. I mean, if we don't talk about... segregation and slavery, if we don't talk about the suffragist movement, if we don't talk about the struggles of LGBT community and the history of who we were and why that was problematic. Not to place blame, not to say that it's your fault today, but it's like, if we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it.