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Sep 01, 2023

The Sexiest Thing You Can Wear Right Now Is A Pair Of Prescription Glasses

By Daniel Rodgers In September 2021, Meta released its first pair of “smart glasses” in collaboration with Ray-Ban. Like an Apple Watch for the face, these Inspector Gadget frames promised to

By Daniel Rodgers

In September 2021, Meta released its first pair of “smart glasses” in collaboration with Ray-Ban. Like an Apple Watch for the face, these Inspector Gadget frames promised to revolutionise modern life, giving people the power to listen to music and take photos while “on the go”. It had never been done before! And it was also the nerdiest thing to happen to optometrical accessories since Roger Bacon – a 13th-century Franciscan friar – invented the magnifying glass to aid his reading.

Much like the magnifying glass – which I don’t think anyone has used since the 1250s – the Facebook glasses failed to find a home in mainstream fashion. That’s because Mark Zuckerberg did this promo video where he said the words “Hey everyone!”, but also because the glasses themselves looked like they were designed for adults who wrote fan-fiction about the Spy Kids franchise. In other words, fashion doesn’t like real-life nerds as much as it likes “nerds ;)”. That is, someone who wears Bayonetta spectacles and hand-me-down cardigans despite being popular and physically attractive.

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When people like Julia Fox and Gabriette and Bella Hadid wear sensible Specsavers glasses (often with the sticker left on the lens), it is an ironic gesture that somehow buttresses their hotness. Similar to when Gisele Bündchen wore these nondescript rectangular frames back in 2006, it is the artifice of dressing like a nerd while looking like a supermodel that makes the effect feel so camp and costumed. It is a “having it both ways”, which ironically is an exchange that can only ever go in one direction: nerds cannot LARP as cool kids because it’s harder to access the top of the social ladder than it is to visit the bottom.

“I’m not sure if they suit me,” Elliot Hoste, a culture writer and self-proclaimed “fashion person” who wears thrifted Burberry shirts, says of his. “But I like their inherent nerdiness and how that can be offset with other elements in an outfit. If I wear my hair in cornrows and have lots of jewellery on, the juxtaposition between the ‘nerdiness’ and ‘trendiness’ is interesting to me. I like the idea of an ‘understated statement’. It’s about reconstituting the ugly and making it cool. Plus, all the other styles have been taken: clear-framed specs are for middle-aged creatives and round ones are for soft bois who read Proust on the Tube for attention.”

Gisele in The Devil Wears Prada.

Bella Hadid in her nerd frames.

Rimless and rectangular, his glasses are perhaps more Pythagoras than Proust (something about defined versus curved edges), but they ride on the same old-school intellect that bubbled up through Miu Miu’s autumn/winter 2023 show in Milan. There, models scuttled onto the catwalk in librarian skirts and off-colour tights, faces framed by oval glasses and rogue clumps of hair backcombed into a post-coital frizz. It was quite “sexy secretary” and quite “hot nerd” – even if those models would baulk at the gruelling lifestyle obligations associated with being a dork.

It was also in Milan that Liana Satenstein – the brains behind NEVERWORNS – first realised that spectacles could be more than a utilitarian object. “Instead,” she writes in her newsletter, “they are a saucy little hint into someone’s personality.” This discovery led her to purchase trapezoid-shaped glasses with pale blue handles. “I was imagining myself in a rimless iteration circa 1998, as some bookish but hot thang who had a steady rotation of cashmere black turtlenecks and wore her hair in a claw clip with a few messy tendril strands falling next to her face,” she explained.

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It means that while Hoste purchased his first pair in 2019 – “Well, I think it’s safe to say I might have been an early adopter,” he tells me in a separate email, along with an attached photo of himself at the Seven Dials branch of Ace & Tate – these nerd specs are fast becoming a standard fashion item. Bespectacled influencers are uploading “teacher slay” videos to TikTok and stylists like Jamie-maree Shipton are using them in sexed-up editorials and Issey Miyake launched these libidinous titanium hexagons. All this has seen searches for “rimless glasses” and “Bayonetta glasses” increase by 44 and 65 per cent respectively on Depop in the past month alone.

This is a fortunate development, because as Satenstein notes, there is a romance to pushing lightweight glasses up the nose and carefully checking something off a clipboard. Perhaps your hair is in a hasty updo and you’re wearing an open-collared shirt? It’s a lot sexier than the thick-set graphic design glasses that have otherwise capitalised the faces of the visually impaired. It is not a “deck” or a “supplied asset” but an annotated line of prose, an “A+, see me”, jotted in the margins of a workbook. Slide these on and you’ve got the illusion of an interior life, most of which you will keep to yourself because you are now a little secretive about your affairs. And that is the one thing the Meta Ray-Bans – with all their selfie beta Facebook stories tech – could never quite achieve.

Megan Fox at the hot nerd convention.

Julia Fox looking spexy in New York.