You There Fellow: Monocles are Back

Either a reflection of the economic times we live in, or just hipsters ransacking the fancy-dress basket of history for accessories to bewilder and appall us? The New York Times reports that the monocle is making a fashion comeback. Interestingly, I haven’t seen a single convincing photograph of anybody sporting one, hipster or otherwise. The few photos I have seen seem to be mock-ups. Maybe they aren’t a thing.

Monocles are pretty much synonymous with effete wealthy people and snobs. When Leslie Knope wants to take a swipe at those fancy Eagleton types on Parks and Recreation, she cracks jokes about them polishing their monocles. They’re not really an optical aid, since they are so hard to keep in place at a proper distance from the eye. When the British boxer Chris Eubank, who is black, stared swaggering around in hunting tweeds and a monocle in the 90′s, he attracted heavy criticism for affecting the civilian trappings of Raj-era colonialism. But he did have a very effete voice for someone who hit people very hard for a living.

Monocles started out as a Regency fashion accessory: the quizzing glass that 18th century fops toyed with, and then the lorgnette, through which dowager duchesses stared balefully at young upstarts and clumsy servants. By the time monocles proper arrived, they were worn by terrifying Prussian army officers, blimpish British colonels and the kind of film directors who wore Jodhpurs and riding boots.

Bullies, basically: Victorian glassholes.

Apparently, the very fabulous Alan Cumming  wears a purple-tinted monocle on the cover of new fashion and arts magazine Spirit and Flesh, but we all know that fashion photographers get people to put on all sorts of eye-catching tat for magazine covers, so that counts for little.

You wear a monocle by gripping the rim of the lens with your soon-to-be-powerfully-developed eyebrow muscle and cranking one of your cheeks up into a humorless half-grin. The whole point of a monocle is to widen one of your eyes and make you stare at things with an horrible, contemptuous attention. They are designed to scare little people and make them feel inadequate. So how come it took hipsters so long to rediscover them?

For Americans, the most famous monocle wearer is Rich Uncle Moneybags, better known as the Monopoly Man. Monopoly, that classic game of capitalist economics from which children learn that once you get rich, there’s no stopping you and God help you if you start losing, was developed during the depths of the Great Depression. So I suppose it makes sense that one percent chic is on the rebound. If Manhattan hipsters really are staring through monocles at bands nobody has heard of yet, then rumors of gentrification trends have obviously reached a literal zenith. I look forward to the return of silk top hats, spats, and silver-topped canes.

A friend pointed out that the modern equivalent of the monocle is Google glass, whose users already seem to be getting a reputation for being abstracted creeps. Google glass doesn’t just stare at you; it takes pictures too, so that everyone on the internet can see what a terrible bore you are. Or maybe they’re not even looking at you. Maybe being stared at is less annoying than being completely ignored while someone reads your resume or watches youtube videos over the top of your head in restaurants.

So you can use the new quizzing glass to check wikipedia.

There really is no way this will not be super-annoying.

You There Fellow: Monocles are Back