Round Sunglasses are loved by artists and rebels alike today, but their design originated through necessity. The earliest glasses in the 1200-1300s were round, as the lenses were essentially magnifying glasses connected together to sit upon your nose, similar to an early pince-nez.
By the 1700s, manufacturers finally hit on the idea of incorporating the temples, giving us the design we’re familiar with today. That paved the way for U.S. heroes like Benjamin Franklin to wear round glasses. It wasn’t until more than 100 years later in the early 1900s, manufacturers started to mass-produce round sunglasses. As you might expect, they were simple wire frame designs, much like their precursors had been hundreds of years earlier.
By the 1920s, these sunglasses exploded in popularity as movie stars, athletes and celebrities donned the lenses. By the 1940s, ‘regular’ folks started purchasing eyewear, but they wanted options. Manufacturers expanded beyond the simple wire frame designs to offer more styles — bold, thick edges, flowery decorations and much more. This was the start of something much bigger, of transformations in the actual shapes and designs.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the counterculture movement placed an emphasis on reuse and anti-consumerism, which drove people to boutiques for vintage sunglasses. Similar to the era’s peace sign, the round glasses were symbolic of resistance to the war and other societal issues—and a connection to the intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s.
Soon, the lenses grew bigger, and the edges grew more pronounced. Circles led to the cat eyes and browlines, which led to the square and oversized glasses. Today, we even have oversized bug-eye sunglasses. All of these owe their style to the original round sunglasses, the grandfather to them all.
