Walking down the street today, I noticed a lot of good looking women wearing glasses. I started thinking “that’s an odd thing to say”. In pop culture until very recently, glasses automatically made women ugly. These days, glasses wearing celebrities like Tina Fey and Lisa Loeb have pretty strong followings and there’s even glasses fetish sites. I’m wondering; when did this change in tastes happen and why?
When I was a kiddo glasses were dorky. In highschool I switched to black plastic frames. I’m on my fourth or fifth pair of those now. After I got them freshman year (2000?) I started noticing other girls at school getting them. They happen to be the kind of frames that look best on my face (squared corners) and I get lots of compliments. I don’t know why glasses started being “cool,” maybe because it became sort of cool to be different or nerdy? And I’m glad people don’t look down on glasses anymore because I refuse to wear contacts.
The same thing is true for men, I think. Even before the waves of indie-rock guys and hipsters wearing black-framed glasses nowadays, guys like Elvis Costello and Woody Allen made it “nerd-chic” to have them.
I think it’s a combination of two factors:
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There is more variety in the frames available, in both shapes and materials used. It is now much easier for me to find frames that look good on my round face (narrow rectangles with medium-weight frames). These weren’t available where I shopped until the last ~7 years or so.
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Featherweight lenses. Anyone with moderately bad to very poor eyesight used to have to wear Coke bottle lenses. These look terrible no matter what frame you use. Now I have the option to get super thin lenses.
I switched to contacts around 1990 because bad frames plus heavy lenses meant I looked ugly in glasses. In 2005, I got a pair of glasses that, for the first time in my life, enhanced my appearance. I wear glasses a lot more often now.
What Q. N. Jones said. I look at old photos of myself with those mammoth aviator frames and I’m appalled. Now I have cute little glasses and life is groovy (though the lenses themselves distort my eyes due to my prescription, but that’s a subject for another day, and possibly LASIK surgery).
It seems that in the 80s glasses became fashionable. If you see a movie from the time, there is often a pretty woman in those big 80s frames. It was right around that time that people started wearing glasses with clear glass, what my friend calls scarecrow glasses (“if I only had a brain”) to look smart.
I really like glasses on women.
A lot.
I dunno. I kind of like girls in glasses–my wife wears them and I think she’s beautiful. I’m lucky that when I wear them (for reading, and low on my nose like an old fart), she still thinks I’m attractive. Glasses never made my wife unattractive, and (if her opinion is anything to go on), never made me unattractive either. So…there you go.
Yeah, the really thin lenses and prettier frames help a lot. My little girl looks adorable in her red flex-wire glasses with wafer-thin lenses. I looked stupid in heavy plastic frames with thick lenses. I still look terrible in glasses, but that’s because there’s really no way to make -14-diopter lenses look nice. I like contacts.
I think glasses became cool when they became unnecessary. Back in the day, people wore glasses because they had to – they were a sign of a handicap, like wearing a hearing aid or leg braces. They were also associated with reading too much, thus identifying the wearer as an intellectual nerd, rather than a cool jock or popular girl.
Once other options became widely available, like contact lenses and more recently laser eye surgery, glasses became a choice. Now girls (and guys) who wear them are doing it by choice, as a fashion statement, and not because they can’t function without them. That makes them cool. Of course, I was way ahead of the trend. I always thought my glasses were cool.
SpoilerVirgin, proud glasses-wearer since 1968.
I like the horizontal rectangles, even if it seems that everybody is wearing them these days. (It’s like there’s a generic Torontonian look: black or dark hair, light brown or Asian skin, black horizontal rectangle glasses, dark coat. I think that look will really stand out in pictures of today, much as all the men of the fifties seem to look the same, to a first approximation, in their hats and suits.)
Interesting. That’s an angle I wouldn’t have thought of.
There’s also the fact that a lot more people need glasses nowadays.
It’s hard to make fun of the “four-eyes nerd” when all the popular people are wearing glasses too.
I think that “girls who wear glasses” stopped being ugly when *glasses * stopped being ugly. Up until the mid to late eighties, they were hideous. I have a million pictures of myself in enormous, thick glasses that covered half my face, and had that peculiar eighties arm that started low on the frame and then bent up toward your ear _/. (Seriously… what was that?)
As Q.N. Jones mentioned, once materials were available that you could make pretty glasses out of, there were pretty glasses. They were absurdly expensive at the time (I vaguely remember buying a pair of adorable Ralph Lauren frames with superthin lenses in 1994ish, and paying nearly $1000 for them), but I’m guessing if anything that only added to their fashion appeal. Now you can buy gorgeous, flattering frames for $50, and super-thin, scratch-resistant, glare-proof lenses for a couple of hundred. Glasses are an accessory now. Hell, glasses are *objet d’art * now. I rarely wear them, because my vision is so bad and I’m so used to contacts that I hate losing the peripheral, but I have three pairs that are so pretty I take them out and look at them every once in a while anyway.
They’re still ugly. Well, they are if you go to Specsavers
Glasses in the 80’s were large and hideous. If you whined enough to your parental units, you could get your monogram on your lenses, which I desperately wanted, but my mother poo-poohed. They were also very. large. frames.
The late eighties saw a shift in selection and by mid 90’s, there were a lot of eye glass places sprouting up with exceptional interesting styles.
By the 2000, buying a pair of really cool euro looking glasses could run you about $800. ( $600 for the frames. $200 for your RX.) I had lasik done in 2002 because all the frames I jones for were over $500 and averaged $700 and my RX was over $350.
Gone are the days of the Marine Recruit/Shop Glasses or Granny horned rimmed glasses as the only choices for those that need spectacles.
You mean like these?
I just ran across an 8th-grade picture of myself wearing those. Truely hideous. Truly. That design doesn’t even stay on your face well, so I don’t get it at all. At the time, thought they were super cool, though. At least I didn’t have the little decal sticker of my initial in the corner, like some girls did. (Yes, that was how huge they were back then…you could monogram the lenses and it wouldn’t actually interfere with your field of vision all that much!)
I wore contacts for a long time, but now I wear the horizontal rectangles in dark plastic. I’m very fairskinned with very dark hair, and I think they provide a good contrast to my face. Actually prefer myself in them to going bare-faced!
I remember in junior high in the '80s struggling with my elderly optometrist about the correct positioning of my glasses. He wanted my eye to be at the exact center of the lens. But that meant that my eyebrows were within the frames. I wanted the top edge of my frames to be below my eyebrows. It looked much more natural to me.
My two cents is that they stopped somewhere between 1968 and 1973. When I look at the incoming freshmen in my class, every single glasses wearer has those hidjus plastic frames, and a lot of the women have those goofy pointy things. By the time I graduated, most people were wearing wire rims, and the pointy stuff was largely gone.
Glasses were probably a bit too clunky and large in the 80s, but I don’t think they were bad looking across the board. Nowadays, as a trifocal wearer, I have to go hunting for larger lenses, and the few available really look like crap.
HAHA! I had those! I thought they were stylin’! And they were clear-ish pink plastic fading to gray on the outside/temple pieces. 
My current glasses are rimless with a copper frame. And with the anti-reflective coating, they’re damned near invisible on me. I like it that way.