Fashionistas go gaga for glasses

 It all started with my mother.

In second grade she purposely misread an eye exam, butchering the letters as they appeared on the screen in front of her.

“Ellen, you need glasses,” her optometrist said. Never had anything sounded so sweet.

Her mother, my grandma, was wise to her game. The prescription was never filled and her dreams were dashed.

I’ve inherited my mother’s curly hair and blue eyes, her ability to fall asleep on any couch at any time, her unpredictable, often terrifying temper and her love of eyewear.

Now that she’s 50-something, her vision is shot and she’s fortunate enough to rock some spectacular rectangular purple spectacles.

I am so envious.

I tried to feign poor eyesight in high school with plastic tortoiseshell rectangular frames. During a game of four-on-four basketball in gym class I was found out when my temper got the best of me and the glasses became a casualty.

Since then, and much to my dismay, my vision has been superb.

The idea of coveting eyeglasses might seem absurd to some people, but it’s something I’ve wanted for years. Generally, the more often you see something, the more appealing it becomes. Because that’s the case, it’s no surprise that my mother or I have such a keen interest in glasses: Approximately 126 million Americans with prescription eyewear only wear eyeglasses, according to a 2002 market report from Eyeglass and Contact Lens Market in the USA, Euromonitor.

In recent years, the move to make glasses less of a necessity and more of an accessory has flooded markets. Vintage-inspired frames are popping up all over pop culture. Take, for example, ads for American Apparel. In the spring and summer many of the models had thick, black frames. Now, there are fewer models with eyewear, but it’s still there being paired as an accessory with simple, basic T-shirts.

Most of these frames are part of the shift that made geek chic trendy (So much for that. See the column from two weeks ago.). It’s nothing new: National chain stores like Forever 21 and Charlotte Russe have jumped on the geek chic bandwagon after it appeared on runways at least two years ago.

Glasses are smart, sophisticated and sleek. Not all people see them that way though. If you have them, many people prefer contacts as they see their glasses as a nuisance. You always want what you don’t have and hate what you do. Sigh.

I’m thinking that by the end of the year I’ll qualify, at least, for a pair of readers. You see, as editor-in-chief, one of my responsibilities is to edit all of the pages before we send them off to print.

(Yeah, we miss things and mistakes are printed. It happens. And, if you had to read the pages in the same condition we did, you’d miss a thing or two. I guarantee it.)

Our proofs, we call them 55s, are tiny. Imagine the entire news page, or any other page, shrunken down to 45 percent of its original size. (It doesn’t even take up the entire sheet of standard paper.) It’s tiny. I squint. My face is about six inches from the paper. That should do the trick, no?

Maybe this editor-in-chief gig has some unforeseeable bonuses. Glasses here I come.