Is this what you meant by bulshevik glasses?

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

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,

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.

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.

Hmm, Hopley's are a bit more Yves Saint Laurent early-70s there, more angular.

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

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

Spot on.

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

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

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

No, it's holidaying. Forever.

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!

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

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/)

Yeah, those Buggles 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.

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

old frame, new friend

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?

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.

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

Fox Harris, Repo Man.

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 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.

Manga and Hentai falls in this somewhere!

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



it's a shame the modern evolution looks like this

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

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?

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

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

Proof of John's claim here.

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

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 :)

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