Sometimes I Just Feel Like a Rock Star!
By Veronica MacDonald Ditko
An Accidental Anthropologist
I schlep into Manhattan with the masses during rush hour. I get pushed and prodded in many directions. I fight for seats on the train. I avoid eye contact. You could say I am the average New Jersey-New York commuter.
Yet I get the star treatment when I wear just one item of clothing – sunglasses. The seats are cleared and the crowds part. My day gets a lot easier. And the best part is, I feel like a rock star.
Sunglasses made Snoopy Joe Cool. Those large bug-eyed sunglasses gave Jackie Onassis a fashion statement. Hippies flocked to get the studious yet small John Lennon spectacles. But where do sunglasses come from and what gave them that “coolness” factor?
They weren’t always so cool – they were just a way for people to maintain poker faces. Sources say that for centuries, Chinese judges wore smoke-colored quartz lenses to conceal their eye expressions in court. That is still true today in those Texas Hold’em tournaments.
But leave it to one Jersey Shore entrepreneur to change all that. In 1929, Sam Foster sold the first pair of Foster Grant sunglasses in Atlantic City, NJ on the boardwalk. Word spread fast, and by 1930, sunglasses were all the rage.
Later in the 1930s sunglasses took a practical turn again when the Army Air Corps commissioned Bausch & Lomb to produce glasses to protect pilots from the dangers of high-altitude glare. The company perfected a special dark-green tint that absorbed light in the yellow band of the spectrum.
In 1936, Ray Ban designed anti-glare aviator style sunglasses using polarized lens technology from Polaroid creator Edwin H. Land. These glasses were made as World War II was heating up. Flyers were given the sunglasses for free, and the public could buy a similar model starting in 1937.
James Dean added a bad boy flavor to wearing sunglasses in “Rebel without a Cause” in 1955. In 1960, a clever advertising campaign by Foster Grant makes sunglasses chic and popular by using celebrities and well-known fashion designers to endorse the company’s sunglasses.
In early 1970, Elvis graced the stage of the International Hotel in Las Vegas, wearing his iconic jumpsuits and sunglasses. The coolness factor hit new heights.
Sunglasses from that point on became a fashion accessory, even a fashion statement, letting the average Joe feel like a rock star when he/she slipped on these glasses.
Now, granted, they have become more practical again with sunglass companies touting the benefits of blocked UVA and UVB sun rays. And Oakley made them even more functional by building in a digital audio player in 2004.
But I know when I slip on those plastic things, I feel invincible. Maybe that’s why people react differently to me. Who knows? Maybe they think I really am a rock star…