Don’t Call It A Comeback! Monocles are facing a recent resurgence in popularity. Apparently, wanting to look like Mr. Peanut or a dated aristocrat is now hip.
Article Courtesy of Express.Co.Uk
THERE is, as far as I know, only one accessory that can immediately bestow the veneer of grandeur upon the everyday fellow. That article is the monocle. By placing the gold-rim
med glass into the socket of an eye, class and eccentricity is instantly conferred upon the wearer. Unfortunately the monocle all but vanished in the post-war era, being consigned to a time when gold watch-chains hung across prosperous bellies and diamond tie pins held together cravats.
But things are changing. The optician Vision Express has announced it is to re-introduce the single eye-glass following a sudden surge of interest among customers. “To our surprise we have had dozens of requests in the last few months so we thought we’d bring back the monocle on a trial basis,” says Bryan Magrath, the chief executive of Vision Express. “We’re as puzzled as anyone by the interest.”
There are of course some who have been ahead of fashion on this matter. Great monocle wearers have included Napoleon and Beethoven, the politician Joseph Chamberlain, the film-maker Fritz Lang, Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and Karl Marx.
Others have become famous almost it would seem because of the glass. Would Sir Patrick Moore have become such a household name if he’d worn normal specs?
And where would Batman’s nemesis The Penguin, the upper-class detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Colonel Mustard from the game Cluedo, comic Jimmy Edwards’s headmaster in Wacko, Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes and of course the Monocled Mutineer have been without their distinguishing glass?
None of these characters, either real or fictional, wore a monocle because of poor eyesight. It is a common misconception that the glass circle is held in the poor eye to help give 20/20 vision. In fact the monocle is nothing more than a well-bred magnifying glass.
“It is always thought of an affectation,” says His Honour Judge Quentin Edwards who has used the glass most of his adult life. “But it is quite simply a clever device to help read small print or study something in detail. It is a quick and easy alternative to reading glasses and it is far more practical than carrying a pair of spectacles. I pull out my monocle to read the telephone directory, look at a menu or when I need to glance quickly at a document in court.
“You put it in your strong eye in the same way you use your strong eye to look through a microscope or fire a rifle.It is something you put in the eye when there is a need to magnify something. It is only in fiction that anybody wears a monocle all the time.”
It is claimed that it was the 17th- century Dutch optician Oliver Van de Kaamp who first created the monocle for those with one eye. However the first recorded use of one was in Rome in the 1720s when the antiquities connoisseur Philip von Stosch wore one to closely examine a set of rare engravings.
It was not for another 100 years that it became popular in Britain when a monocle framed by a simple loop of metal became fashionable in the 1830s. A second style emerged in the 1890s that had a raised edge to help hold it in place.
It is generally accepted by historians that the reason the monocle became a symbol of the upper classes is because it was adopted by army officers who could not enlist if they were found to need spectacles. The monocle was a way around the problem. It was acceptable to the authorities in both Britain and Germany and that in turn led to it being copied by the gentry in Civvy Street.
Monocles vanished mostly thanks to advances in optometry, in particular contact lenses, that have rendered them a less useful bit of kit. Lenses also did for the lorgnette (spectacles at the end of a handle) and the pince-nez (glasses supported by pinching them on to the bridge of the nose).
I fear the monocle’s comeback may not be sustained. It is difficult to imagine the average plumber lifting a single eye-glass as he applies the wrench or a butcher squinting through a corded lens as he wields the knife. And despite the belief that it is now on the cutting edge of fashion I cannot see Bono from U2 giving up his dark glasses or Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker dumping his black-rimmed specs for a solitary eye-piece.
Furthermore, now that New Labour has re-introduced the class war to the nation we have to face the fact that it is unlikely we will ever see Prime Minister Gordon Brown using one in his good eye. It is, however, certainly possible to imagine Lord Mandelson giving us a snide look through one. Now that would be class in a glass.
