The myopia of fashion, or the fashion of myopia

My vulgar utilitarianism has always made it easy for me to pass off fashion as the senseless triumph of form over function. Opting for milquetoast combinations of khakis with inoffensive button-downs or lifeless t-shirts lets me wear the same clothes for years without the slightest consideration for how they stack up against the latest summer wardrobes. There’s only one area where this strategy really ran off the tracks – glasses.

Here I’ve fallen hook line and sinker, with these hip-looking 21^st century stylized spectacles that get me no shortage of compliments. Their clear frames make them look sleek and modern like an Apple designed tablet (I’ve taken to calling them my i-glasses). My enormously thick lenses (due to being almost legally blind) usually weigh down the glasses and make them look uglier and nerdier, but in this case actually create a sharp line along the frames that give them a tricked-out kind of appearance.

But the problem with these glasses, like just about any with plastic frames, is that they are horridly impractical. They never quite fit right, so they’re always slipping off my face. When it’s hot and my face is sweaty, they practically fall off every time I lean over to read something. I’ve found out the hard way that you can’t adjust them on your own – I’ve snapped frames down the middle trying to bend them. I once tried to heat up one pair of glasses with a lighter so I could mold them, which left a big burnt plastic smudge in the middle of the frames (chalk that up to fashion, I suppose). I once dunked them in boiling water to soften them up, which completely warped the lenses and forced me to buy new ones. Adjusting them requires going to an eyewear shop, where they heat up the glasses with a special machine to adjust them. The effects usually last twenty-five minutes before I’m back to shoving the glasses back up the bridge of my nose every ten minutes.

It reminds me of one of many Milan Kundera books that I never quite got through (The Joke maybe?) about a Victorian-era woman in Europe talking to a female counterpart with an annoying pince-nez that keeps bouncing up and down. The woman is ultimately so annoyed by the bouncing pince-nez that she ups and smacks the woman across the face for no reason.

Not like my old wireframe glasses, with the silicone nubs on the nose to hold them in place. Those actually stuck on my face. If they got a little bent out shape, all you had to do was bend them back into shape again.

So how did I get here? (At this point I should clarify – laser surgery is not an option. People with a prescription of -11/-9 do not have enough cornea to be able to safely undergo Lasic. The only other option is a surgically inserted contact lens. No thanks.)

There was actually a decade of my life that I managed to avoid the issue off glasses all together, escaping into the realm of contact lenses that turned a nerdy and self-conscious elementary school kid into a nerdy and self conscious junior high-school kid with delusions of being cool. I ditched the old huge, plastic-framed coke bottles – for good, I’d hoped – imminently increasing my chances with the girls.

I wore my contact lenses from dawn until dusk, never even touching my glasses except for emergency situations that usually involved me losing or tearing a contact lens. My eyes acquired a permanent blood-shot quality from over use of lenses, leading ophthalmologists to insist I was smoking pot.

I kept up that routine until I started reporting, and my eyes just couldn’t take it anymore. It was literally a question of weeks, just from spending so much time staring at a computer screen and reading newspapers. So I picked up the old school glasses I had, the wire frame kind.

“Oh my god, you can’t wear those,” said the woman I was kinda dating at the time. “Nobody wears those wire things anymore. We’ve gotta get you a new pair.” She dragged me down to an eyewear shop, where, at her behest, I tried on a dozen different pairs of plastic framed glasses that were all the rage. They reminded me of the old coke bottles I used to wear when I was a kid that earned me so many snarky side comments. “Are you serious?” I asked her. “This is what people wear these days?” I took this woman’s advice, 13 years after I swore I’d never touch another pair of those things. I bought ‘em, and I kept buying the same style years after she ditched me, or I ditched her, or whatever happened.

It brings to mind a phrase I like to think I either coined or popularized myself – the Highschool Yearbook Phenomenon ™. It’s that outfit or shirt or haircut which, through a process of collective cognitive resonance, goes from being unforgivably ugly to unbearably hip. And often evolves back the other way again, such that what you knew for a fact was cool in highschool will without the slightest doubt look just plain dumb a few years later. At 14 I woke up every morning to “tight roll” my pant legs so nobody could accuse me of wearing bell-bottoms. By 17 I had to start buying pants baggy enough to cover my shoes so nobody could accuse me of tight-rolling. Now tight is back, but with a big baggy bulge at the crotch. I can’t say I get it. I mostly learned to stop running in this circle and stay on the sidelines with my lifeless Gap fashion.

Except for my glasses. Arguably the most important thing I put on every morning, the one that lets me get to work without getting hit by a truck or running into a telephone pole, the one that should most logically be exempted from the dictates of modern fashion. I can console myself with the fact that these glasses sure do look cool.

Though I’m just picturing it now, sitting down with my kids in 20 years time to look at old family photos on our shiny new i-pads or whatever people will be using. And one of my kids will stumble across one of the few photos in which I didn’t take off my glasses, and practically jump out of their chair, shouting what I’d known for decades I’d hear.

“Dad!!!! How did you ever manage to wear glasses that UGLY!!”