As serious as the Cold War
Jun. 27th, 2009 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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!
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 11:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 11:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 11:57 pm (UTC)They work great in a pinch for a Ginsberg costume, too,
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 12:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 12:08 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 12:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 01:15 am (UTC)HIPSTEEEEEEEEEER
Date: 2009-06-27 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 02:08 am (UTC)I beg to differ
Date: 2009-06-27 03:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 04:14 am (UTC)I'm trying to get better at taking in these fine details. I've been fascinated by the Sartorialist blog lately because he seems to have such a good eye for them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 04:17 am (UTC)So, you really do have a working eye behind that patch?
Re: I beg to differ
Date: 2009-06-27 04:21 am (UTC)Although I found some photos of Brezhnev looking like a cross between Momus's specs and Jack Nicholson.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 05:35 am (UTC)No-one is serious, just little girls dressing up
Date: 2009-06-27 08:54 am (UTC)Would an architect try to look how an architect should look?
Would a hipster try to look how a hipster should look?
Is this why modern culture leaves us with an empty feeling?
Are we masochists to a legacy of visual pop culture?
Are we so b-division?
Did the Young British Artists do so well because they dressed like nothing much at all?
How difficult is that - to dress 'nothing'?
Momus is not serious - he is "The Man Who Follows the 20th Century Everything"
Date: 2009-06-27 08:59 am (UTC)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"
Date: 2009-06-27 09:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 09:16 am (UTC)Re: I beg to differ
Date: 2009-06-27 09:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 10:32 am (UTC)"big goofy nerd glasses, the new black rimmed geek glasses."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 10:40 am (UTC)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
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 10:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 11:07 am (UTC)Re: No-one is serious, just little girls dressing up
Date: 2009-06-27 11:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-27 11:14 am (UTC)