Why Sunglasses at Night Are Still the Coolest Bad Idea in Fashion

It’s believed that the primary “sunglasses”—ivory goggles with a small slit for every eye—had been invented through the Inuit other folks across the 13th century to defend their eyes from the solar’s glare off the snow. In the 18th century, the Venetians adopted swimsuit, the use of shaded Murano glass lenses to offer protection to themselves from the daylight reflecting off the water of their town’s canals. Aviators had been invented within the 1930s when the U.S. Army Air Corps introduced up the will for anti-glare sunglasses for its pilots. Mountain climbers and explorers required specifications too, as did, in time, tens of millions of abnormal beachgoers. At no level on this centuries-long development did someone suggest for dressed in shades at night time.

Cut to 1960s New York City, in some smoke-filled, subterranean membership in Greenwich Village. Midcentury jazz impresarios like Thelonious Monk and Chet Baker had been already identified for his or her nocturnal sunglasses when a tender, scowling musician named Bob Dylan began warbling his folks songs from at the back of massive Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Unlike the Inuits, those singers used their specifications no longer as a way of coverage, however as a device for obfuscation. “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes / There are secrets in them that I can’t disguise,” sang Dylan in “Long and Wasted Years.” Two many years later, a singer who didn’t make it slightly as giant as Dylan—the Canadian two-hit marvel Corey Hart—added, “I wear my sunglasses at night / So I can keep track of visions in my eyes.”

By that time, musicians of all genres had been carrying shades at night time. Swaggering rock stars like Nick Cave, Mick Jagger, and Sid Vicious incessantly wore them to golf equipment and past due into the night time, to cover that they had been top out in their gourds. But the specifications served any other, extra convoluted objective: To put on shades at night time or indoors is to concurrently call for privateness and a spotlight. It’s a central contradiction of repute—in the end, who doesn’t do a head flip once they see somebody in wraparounds at 3 a.m., stumbling out of a membership? Chances are they’re a star, a complete mess, or, very continuously, each.

Then, in fact, there’s the truth that if you’ll pull off the glance—and that’s an overly giant if—it’s cool. “Sunglasses aren’t just functional,” says Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, the president of Ray-Ban. “With fashion comes mystery.” Sunglasses have at all times made musicians—even the overexposed ones—appear inscrutable, suggesting that perhaps there’s something extra to find about them. Perhaps that’s why nowadays, celebrities in shades at strange hours and events have turn out to be so common. “With my sunglasses on, I’m Jack Nicholson,” mentioned the actor in 1997. “Without them, I’m fat and 60.” Victoria Beckham, the Spice Girl became dressmaker who has savvily performed the celebrity recreation for 3 many years, continuously wore wraparounds whilst sitting entrance row at type presentations within the aughts. Surely, they made it tougher for her to peer the garments—however more straightforward for others to note her. “My glasses say a lot about me,” mentioned Beckham in 2017. “Me in a pair of sunglasses is an image that a lot of people would recognize.”

It’s additionally true that, simply as aircraft pilots have UV rays to dam, celebrities have paparazzi flashbulbs to cope with. A couple of sun shades is a protecting layer, some way for stars to carry directly to a little of themselves in a tradition that asks them to be nakedly uncovered always. Think of Hailey Bieber sliding on Saint Laurent sunglasses all through her stroll up the steps on the 2021 Met Gala, hiding tears from a wall of photographers as a gaggle of Selena Gomez enthusiasts—it seems that no longer over Gomez’s breakup with Justin Bieber—heckled the fashion. Bieber was once nonetheless on show—simply no longer totally. “It’s not about hiding,” says Moritz Krueger, the founder and inventive director of the shades emblem Mykita. Rather, glasses venture “attitude without cutting you off from the world.”

The pattern isn’t going away anytime quickly. Last 12 months, for her club-pop album Brat, Charli xcx recorded, then lower, a track titled “He Wears His Sunglasses at Night.” In any other unreleased Brat monitor, “Made It,” she sings, “There’s people looking at me, ’cause I’m a star / Sunglasses gotta stay on, way after dark.” A$AP Rocky would most probably believe that sentiment. This previous February, Del Vecchio employed him as Ray-Ban’s first ever inventive director. Rocky’s preliminary venture was once the Blacked Out Collection, a spread of glasses with lenses that come, consistent with the rapper’s request, in “the darkest shades possible.”

Collage: Top row, from left: Rod Stewart, circa 1977; Bob Dylan, 1965; Miles Davis, 1973; Grace Jones, circa 1995; Lady Gaga, 2008; A$AP Rocky, 2025; Charli xcx, 2023. Second row, from left: Max Roach, circa 1967; Mick Jagger, circa 1970; Sid Vicious, 1978; Cher, 1984; David Bowie, 1997; Hailey Bieber, 2021; SZA, 2024. Third row, from left: Dizzy Gillespie, circa 1958; Chet Baker, 1962; George Clinton, 1980; Prince, 1984; Cyndi Lauper, 1984; Kurt Cobain, 1993; Snoop Dogg, early 2000s; Paris Hilton, 2000; The Dare, 2024. Bottom row, from left: Thelonious Monk and Howard McGhee, 1947; Elton John, circa 1975; Corey Hart’s ‘Sunglasses at Night’ album quilt, 1983; Jack Nicholson, 1993; Victoria Beckham, 2007; Bad Bunny, 2023.

Top row, from left: Art Zelin/Getty Images; Doug McKenzie/Getty Images; R. Brigden/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Rose Hartman/Archive Photos/Getty Images; Andreas Branch/Patrick McMullan by way of Getty Images; Jacopo Raule/GC Images; Neil Mockford/Ricky Vigil M/GC Images. Second row, from left: David Redfern/Redferns; Art Zelin/Getty Images; © Bob Gruen; Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images; Steve Eichner/Getty Images; Theo Wargo/Getty Images; Mega/GC Images. Third row, from left: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Corbis by way of Getty Images; © Bob Willoughby/mptvimages.com; Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG by way of Getty Images; Gene Shaw/Getty Images; Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Kurt Krieger/Corbis by way of Getty Images; David Keeler/Online USA; Myles Hendrik. Bottom row, from left: Heritage Art/Heritage Images by way of Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; Records/Alamy; Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection by way of Getty Images; Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images; Mega/GC Images.