As serious as the Cold War

[imomus]

I'm serious. A very serious writer, artist, intellectual, or something like that. You can tell I'm serious because I wear a serious expression, a black shirt, a black eye-patch, and black spectacle frames from the Cold War. They're not those oblong 90s "designer" ones which went out of fashion in the recent "spectacles paradigm shift", but some proper "serious person in the Cold War" glasses. During the Cold War things were very serious indeed, because you could get blown up at any moment by nuclear weapons, and there were serious things like existentialism and liberation theology to think about.

Because I'm fascinated by the transformation they effect, I've taken to asking friends to try on the serious frames I bought recently for €3 in an Athens flea market. The results -- please study them seriously -- are below. They begin, top left, with Joe Howe.



Actually, those are Joe's own Raybans. He's had them for quite a while -- though when I first met him two years ago he wore a pair of oblong 90s "designer" glasses. Joe then got the Rayban Wayfarer frames, the ones Buddy Holly died in, which came back in the late 1980s (I had a pair in 1987), the ones Robert Lowell was wearing in 1962 when he wrote: "One swallow makes a summer / The moon rises, luminous with terror". Of course Lowell meant, by "swallow", a nuclear missile, and by "summer", a nuclear holocaust triggered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those were serious times.



Really, who would wear 90s-style "designer" oblong frames when you could be wearing serious Cold War retro frames like Michael Caine's? The paradigm shift to Cold War seriousness is well underway in Japan, too -- witness these street fashion snaps taken in the streets of Daikanyama and Harajuku over the last month or so:



Not only do they make you look as serious as the Cold War, these frames fit well with 80s-retro clothes, which are of course the "correct" ones to be reviving at the moment. Serious Cold War frames were still being worn (on their first return) as late as 1994 -- here's Konishi from Pizzicato 5 in the Twiggy Twiggy video made that year, looking seriously geeky-funky:



Of course Konishi -- a bit like Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian -- is forever in thrall to the 1960s. Here's the whole P5 video, just because the frames and the dancing have to be seen together. You really need to catch that 1960s moment when squares started to get groovy, that's what these serious-yet-switched-on frames signify here:

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Do The Twist, because we might all die by The Bomb tomorrow! Here's Rolf Harris in the early 1960s, looking like an art student and singing silly songs about wallabies and peg legs to take our minds off the impending nuclear holocaust. Doesn't he look like Jan, below Joe in the picture above?



I'm pleased with my new old frames, and the transition they effect, a move towards deep nuclear seriousness. After all, I do have two books coming out. But Hisae tells me these Cold War frames are boring. She's more into the owl-eye frames worn by late-1960s David Hockney -- and just about every architect ever.



You can see Hockney wearing the owl frames in A Bigger Splash, the best film (I think) ever made about an artist. Perhaps not the most serious, though.

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Though I didn't realise it when I posted it, this entry owes a lot to artist Catherine Soto's Glasses project, where she gets people to pose in her Raybans. Catherine had the idea first -- and her business card even says "I'm serious" on it!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Is this what you meant by bulshevik glasses?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, that line in The Gatecrasher about "Bolshevik glasses" is a reference to the style being worn here by Keith Haring:

[skazat.livejournal.com]

It's best if you wear such serious glasses, with a hat that has the Soviet Union on them, posing like an art student. A serious art student. Who can't keep their mouth closed.



They work great in a pinch for a Ginsberg costume, too,

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was going to mention Ginsberg too! Where was it I recently saw a Ginsberg t-shirt with just his skull, his hair, and those frames? Oh, right, it was here (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-streetginsberg-tee-florence.html).

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

That look doesn't really do much for me unless it's done the way Robert Lowell, Michael Kaine and Konishi Yasuharu are executing it: with a restrained haircut, a suit and a tie.



Actor Roger Hopley also executes it extremely well in this Tiga video. Done well, it's smoking hot.

Otherwise, they're getting too ubiquitous and these days are more closely associated with hoodies and threadless tees than formal wear. My frames have been getting more and more minimal in an attempt to balance the trend toward chunky black frames. My current glasses, purchased in 2007, leave off the bottom part of the frame.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hmm, Hopley's are a bit more Yves Saint Laurent early-70s (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OAh4Xl94vrU/SERoiKb_B4I/AAAAAAAADwg/azkopQQGJaU/s400/Yves,+betty.bmp) there, more angular.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

[krring.livejournal.com]

Ohhh boy, Kouji, your middle name must be Kudos, because your spec-how wins timelessly hands-down! Not to mention your models.

HIPSTEEEEEEEEEER

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

[psychronic.livejournal.com]

I beg to differ

[funazushi.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry but these are the true cold war glasses.

Re: I beg to differ

[parallel-botany.livejournal.com]

Spot on.

Although I found some photos of Brezhnev looking like a cross between Momus's specs and Jack Nicholson.

[dabroots.livejournal.com]

Ginsberg's glasses in his last years were not so interesting.

So, you really do have a working eye behind that patch?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, it's holidaying. Forever.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Momus is not serious - he is "The Man Who Follows the 20th Century Everything"

[(Anonymous)]

One day he is pro-artifice, he is Jeff Koons, the next he is folk pottery

One day he is Chairman Mao, the next he extols playfulness

One day he is postmodern, the next he dislikes Jurassic necro things

One day design should make the world a better place, the next he is subversive

Put all the 20th century art manifestos and ideas in one big pot - Momus follows them all!

Re: Momus is not serious - he is "The Man Who Follows the 20th Century Everything"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Chairman Mao was a very playful guy once you got to know him.

[pulled-up.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

As someone said on my Flickr the other day:
"big goofy nerd glasses, the new black rimmed geek glasses."

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/iloveacomputer/3595319356/)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those Buggles (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_4YTVtMhY-n0/RssvBLZuqQI/AAAAAAAAALU/KJVXBxiQJYc/s320/buggles1.jpg) frames you have are a good alternative to the Raybans thing. They're much more reference-specific, because whereas the Raybans could refer to the 50s, 60s or 80s, the Buggles ones can only -- and forever! -- be 1980.

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

not bad

the trick to making glasses look good is trying to make them iconic for yourself instead of a flash in a pan and wearing them in all interesting photos. jarvis cocker, graham coxon, elvis costello, woody allen, etc. i think you should start wearing cardigans, too

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

old frame, new friend

[krring.livejournal.com]

I suddenly realise this is an invaluable opportunity to shed some light (stifle that titter, young man!) on some fake sunglasses which made an appearance around Glasgow some months back. Now they've vanished, sweeping their traces up with them.

This may turn out to be a most obvious question to pose, but pose I shall, not being poseur enough to know better.

It all started funnily enough with my mum being handed a pair of them by someone claiming she dropped them. A favourable enough fate to land them in my hands. They were very lightly tinted grey, but seemed more like 3D glasses than anything else; but the most delightful thing was how just ridiculously concave enough they were, and I went around for a few days in a beautiful shrinkwrapped haze. Then one day, I left them at someone's house, and again fate played a hand - this friend's mum herself owned three pairs, but had recently lost one, and in the resulting confusion there was little to do but simply let go of my once hipness. Since then, the signs of their existence have slowly faded.

I should remember the name printed on them, because it was memorable, but at least none of those mentioned so far have rung any bells so hopefully I'm not disastrously revealing my spec-crassness.

Anyone?

[krring.livejournal.com]

On a side note, a recent pair of glasses I ran into which looked arty as hell and hip as fuck all - Ireland sunglasses, with an Irish flag pixelled onto each visor. The man wearing them claimed to have directed Shallow Grave, but hid behind them the dead eyes of Derek Jarman. Odd, odd, almost horror.

[(Anonymous)]

You are the most strident of hipster fashion victims, Momus.

[(Anonymous)]

Fox Harris, Repo Man.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The poet / weird singer Rogan Whitenails is calling me "churlish" for not including him in my serious Cold War spectacles Hall of Fame, so I'll link to his very odd video (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=113829561578&ref=mf) about De Gaulle bottling his own blood. To be fair, Whitenails only wears the frames very briefly in this clip, but he says he's been wearing them since 1997, stoically resisting the peak-prime of the oblong "designer" rubbish, when peer pressure made narrow pharmacist-peering more or less obligatory.

as the Cold

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Manga and Hentai falls in this somewhere!

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

I'd love some of these 60s prada frames:



it's a shame the modern evolution looks like this

[(Anonymous)]

crowjake, your hair is excellent, but you should really lose the sideburns.

i got some blue ones...

[(Anonymous)]

http://i43.tinypic.com/2k52d3.jpg

don't worry momus, any krank in the world will be able to build a nuke in their shed within 20 years, so all the existential seriousness will be back in full force.

india and pakistan are having a mini-cold war right now, i wonder if these frames are big over there?

[(Anonymous)]

Hey asshole, how the hell can you write an article about the black heavy frames without mentioning mine...surely after all the times over the past 6 or so years with you picking on me for looking supposedly like Buddy in my many now-well-worn pairs you could come up with atleast a mention of the fellow (yes me) that had them on during rain, snow, sun and all the other times it sucked to be wearing them.
ps-Just shipped off my new/old pair of clear fascist-angled frames two days ago with my new prescrip; now really is a turning point in my now rather identifyingly present frames. Just wanted to say what the fuck, that's all.
-John Flesh

[(Anonymous)]

...and seriously, I'm not serious.
-John Flesh

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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Proof of John's claim here.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A couple of late arrivals in the series: Emma and Kyoka.

jp lovely patterns search

[fishmonkeytrip.livejournal.com]

Out of so many cool shots, Michael Caine really stands out -maybe its the photographer.

Shamelessly opportunistic of me, but does anyone have japanese sewing pattern searching skills to locate the pattern for that lovely dress / top in the P5 vid? I'm assuming knowing how to search in jp is helpful.

(gorgeous dress and striking lips: perfectly sculptured almost - if I were going to self-construct, MJ style, Id take a snapshot of those lips along to the local cosmetic surgeon - would be fun trying to recreate those :)

Jarvis 1, Momus 0.

[(Anonymous)]

Have we mentioned Jarvis Cocker who wears them as naturally as trees do leaves?