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Harold Lloyd
Born
Harold Lloyd created his Glasses character in 1917, an eager young man in round horn-rimmed frames, and wore lensless versions so the studio lights would not reflect. The frames made an ordinary-looking hero instantly recognisable, most famously hanging from the clock face in Safety Last! (1923).
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Groucho Marx
Groucho Marx's round wire glasses, painted-on moustache, heavy eyebrows and cigar made up one of the most copied faces in comedy through the Marx Brothers films of the 1930s. The combination became a cheap novelty disguise sold as Groucho glasses, which says how firmly the frames belong to him.
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Ray Charles
Born
Ray Charles lost his sight as a child, and the dark glasses he wore through his career became inseparable from his image at the piano, head rocking and grin wide. Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning performance in Ray (2004) used the same frames as its visual shorthand.
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Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly swapped lighter frames for thick black horn-rims bought from an optician in Mexico City in 1958, and they became the image of the bespectacled rock and roll star. Recovered after his death, the glasses are now displayed at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, and the style is still named after him.
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Audrey Hepburn
Born
The oversized tortoiseshell sunglasses Audrey Hepburn wears as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), usually credited to the London maker Oliver Goldsmith, appear in the film's opening shot outside the jewellers. With the black Givenchy dress they made sunglasses part of one of cinema's best-known looks.
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Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder, blind since infancy, has worn dark glasses since his days as Little Stevie at Motown in the early 1960s. With braided hair in the 1970s, the glasses framed the image of his run of albums from Talking Book to Songs in the Key of Life and remain his constant signature.
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Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison left his ordinary glasses on a plane in 1963 and went on stage in prescription dark glasses for a British tour with the Beatles. He kept them, and the black frames, black clothes and still stage manner became the enigmatic image that suited his operatic ballads.
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Eric Morecambe
Eric Morecambe made his heavy-rimmed glasses a prop, knocking them askew, peering over them at Ernie Wise and slapping the back of his own neck in mock alarm. Through The Morecambe and Wise Show from the 1960s to the 1980s, the glasses became part of the warmth of British television comedy.
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Michael Caine
Born
Michael Caine wore his own heavy black frames as the spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File (1965), a pointed contrast with the polished James Bond. The glasses made Palmer look like a working-class civil servant rather than a playboy, and they became part of Caine's image as a London star of the decade.
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John Lennon
Born
John Lennon first wore small round wire frames for his role in How I Won the War (1966) and kept them, turning the plain, National Health-style glasses into a counterculture symbol. They appear in nearly every image of his later career, and round frames are still widely called Lennon glasses.
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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Born
After leaving the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was photographed constantly in oversized dark sunglasses, often with a headscarf, through the late 1960s and 1970s. The large frames offered some privacy from the photographers who followed her, and the shape is still sold as the Jackie O.
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Elton John
Born
Elton John has worn glasses since childhood, and in the 1970s he turned them into stage costume: giant star shapes, feathered and rhinestone frames, even a pair that spelt out his name in lights. His collection runs into many thousands of pairs, and the glasses are central to the flamboyance celebrated in Rocketman (2019).
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Barry Humphries
Born
Barry Humphries gave his character Dame Edna Everage a pair of swept-up, diamanté-studded wing frames that grew more outrageous as the act moved from Melbourne suburbs to international television. Along with the lilac hair and gladioli, the glasses made Edna recognisable from across any theatre.
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Elvis Costello
Born
Elvis Costello appeared on the cover of My Aim Is True (1977) in thick horn-rims, knock-kneed with a guitar, a deliberately awkward image that set him apart from punk's posturing. The frames invited constant comparisons with Buddy Holly, and they stayed part of his look for decades as his music moved far beyond new wave.
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Christopher Reeve
Born
In Superman (1978) Christopher Reeve made a pair of glasses a convincing disguise, playing Clark Kent with a stoop, a softer voice and clumsy manners so that the frames seemed to change the whole man. His double act is still the benchmark for how much character a pair of glasses can carry on screen.
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Jack Nicholson
Born
Jack Nicholson's dark sunglasses, worn courtside at Lakers games and in the front row at the Oscars, are as much a part of his public persona as the eyebrows and the grin. Indoors or out, they suit his image as Hollywood's knowing insider, and they have barely changed in decades.
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Anna Wintour
Born
Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue from 1988, has made dark sunglasses and a precise bob her fixed public uniform, worn front row at shows indoors and out. She has said the glasses are practical as well as protective, and the look is so identified with her that it is part of the shorthand whenever she is parodied or portrayed.
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Bono
Born
Bono adopted wraparound dark glasses for The Fly, his leather-clad stage persona on U2's Zoo TV Tour (1992), and tinted lenses have been part of his look ever since. In 2014 he explained that he has glaucoma and his eyes are sensitive to light, which gave a practical reason to a famous piece of rock styling.
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Kurt Cobain
Born
Kurt Cobain's white oval sunglasses, a Christian Roth design he wore in 1993, became one of the defining accessories of grunge. Worn with a thrift-shop cardigan or a leopard-print coat, they summed up his mix of fragility and offhand glamour, and replicas have sold steadily ever since.
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Lisa Loeb
Born
Lisa Loeb's cat-eye frames were the focus of the single-take video for Stay (I Missed You), directed by Ethan Hawke, which took the song to number one in the United States in 1994 before she had a record deal. The glasses became her signature and later her own eyewear range.
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Jarvis Cocker
Born
Jarvis Cocker's thick frames, tight charity-shop suits and angular dancing made him the most distinctive frontman of Britpop when Pulp broke through with Different Class (1995). The glasses fitted his role as the observant, wry outsider singing about ordinary British lives.
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Karl Lagerfeld
Born
Karl Lagerfeld rarely appeared without dark glasses, and from the late 1990s they joined his powdered white ponytail, high collars and fingerless gloves in a uniform he kept until his death in 2019. The designer of Chanel and Fendi made his own image as precise and repeatable as a logo.
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Daniel Radcliffe
Born
Daniel Radcliffe wore Harry Potter's round frames through eight films from 2001 to 2011, and with the lightning scar they became the most recognisable glasses of a generation. For millions of children the round shape was simply Harry's, and the films made glasses-wearing heroes feel ordinary.
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Iris Apfel
Born
Iris Apfel's enormous round black frames, worn with stacks of bangles and bold textiles, made the interior designer an unlikely fashion star in her eighties after the Metropolitan Museum's 2005 exhibition of her wardrobe. Albert Maysles's documentary Iris (2014) fixed the image, and she remained a style reference until her death in 2024 at 102.
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