41 years ago Yoko Ono took a photograph of the end of a collective dream. It showed the most recognizable glasses in history, stained with blood, placed next to a glass of water that was clearly half empty. As a backdrop, the misty view of the trees of Central Park behind and the recognizable skyline of Manhattan. The artist was still in the Dakota building where Mark David Chapman had just murdered John Lennon and that photo (which later illustrated his album) Season of Glasspublished in 1981) became a relic. A symbol of the violent end of something bigger than the most famous musician in history: a saint of pop culture, a symbol of pacifism and the hippie ideal. Of that world, without countries, without heaven or hell, without wars or religions that an entire generation imagined. Of the kind of life Lennon wanted to see through his round-lensed glasses.
Today the rebellious spirit of those glasses remains a recognized simile: a few days ago the political scientist and co-founder of Podemos Juan Carlos Monedero —who wears very similar lenses to those of the artist— quoted in X his “disobedient Lennon glasses” (and with them he implied his way of seeing and understanding things) as the reason for his umpteenth breakup with Pablo Iglesias. Here we review the history, symbolism and curiosities about this type of glasses, which began as a piece of craftsmanship in Germany, became the most popular in England, and became the most recognizable element of the man “more famous than Jesus” and ended up being an adjective in themselves.
Initially, Lennon did not wear glasses. Despite having significant myopia (his prescription was -8.25 in his right eye and -7.50 in his left, according to an analysis he did in 2019 by St Paul’s Eye Unit), he spent years wearing contact lenses. The first time he appeared with his iconic round wire lenses was in Spain: specifically in Almería, where he filmed the Richard Lester film How I Won the Warbased on the 1963 novel by Patrick Ryan, a black comedy in which he played a soldier named Gripweed. The film went unnoticed, but Lennon found himself comfortable in the Windsor-framed glasses for which he would become known around the world.
Those black acetate glasses were made of coiled metal wire. Traditional Windsor glasses feature a circular wire frame, round lenses, and a saddle-shaped bridge, also known as a W bridge, which sits directly on the nose, with no nose pads (these came in the 1920s and glasses were common since 1880). Because of their small, rounded shape, they are also called ‘tea glasses’ or ‘glasses with a rounded rim’. teashades in English.
After the film, Lennon began wearing this style of glasses, specifically the model Panto 45 from London-based manufacturer Algha Works, now known as Savile Row, the oldest in the UK. Since 1932, the factory has been producing wire frames using late 19th-century machinery from a factory in Rathenow (Germany) founded in 1898 by Max Wiseman, who created the company in 1898. In 2020, the headquarters moved to Italy, where they continue to be manufactured by hand and with 18-carat gold frames.
At its peak, Algha was making 1.5 million frames a year as part of the NHS’s free glasses scheme and employed up to 150 people before Margaret Thatcher stopped the scheme in 1988. As well as Lennon, its famous clients included Elizabeth II, Sean Connery, Daniel Radcliffe in the Harry Potter, Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Denzel Washington o Johnny Depp.
Soon, Lennon tried orange tint, a shade customized by Agha in the 1970s that allowed the Englishman to see the world in a warmer color, and not just figuratively. That orange filter stayed with him forever (he composed songs like Imagine wearing these glasses) but it also probably helped reduce the visual stress on his eyes: Lennon is believed to have suffered from an optical condition known as Irlen syndrome, a type of photophobia that made him especially sensitive to bright light.
Orange was also a color that the artist found inspiring: Lennon reportedly believed in Feng Shui, which says that the color orange promotes creativity.
Lennon was one of the first artists to understand his glasses as a style statement rather than a visual aid. In the midst of Beatlemania, these round, wire-framed glasses were an integral part of his expression, a kind of amulet: not only did they serve an obvious function, but they also helped him manage the persona of the most famous man in the world (even more so than Jesus Christ, as he himself said in an interview with the BBC). Evening London Standard (1966). At that time, this type of glasses was already associated with relevant people such as Gandhi, James Joyce, Groucho Marx and Hemingway, and Janis Joplin had started wearing them in the sixties.
Thus, Lennon’s glasses began to symbolise him and his causes, his ideals and his extravaganzas: “I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to fit in with anything” is one of the phrases attributed to him at that time. As he became a countercultural icon and a staunch activist against the Vietnam War, he began collecting dozens of them, usually round, but also with thicker frames. He bought them at flea markets (one of his favourite stalls is said to have been in London’s Camden Passage) and also from an optometrist on New York’s Upper West Side (Dr Gary Tracy still has his practice today). Although one of his favourites was a flip-up pair called Green Japanese that was hand-made in Tokyo. She also wore 14-carat gold ones, with a version that predated photochromic glass (a lens that reacts to light and darkness), and she also liked the Kolus model designed in 1962 with a very beveled silhouette by Oliver Goldsmith, a brand that is still sold today.
Their most distinctive trademark was their glasses, and this brand still remembers today the impact their lenses had on popular culture: “When The Beatles arrived in the United States in 1964, they brought with them a fresh and exciting fashion sensibility that captivated American youth. Young fans on both sides of the Atlantic sought to emulate their style, sparking a global frenzy for anything remotely related to the Fab Four. As the 1960s progressed, so did the Beatles’ musical and fashion sensibilities. Their groundbreaking album Revolverreleased in 1966, marked a turning point in both their sound and style. The cover, designed by Klaus Voormann, featured a collage psychedelic and bold that reflected the band’s evolving creative spirit. The album cover and their experimental fashion choices of the time became emblematic of the psychedelic era.”
With his round glasses he appeared in his legendary bed-in, a curious silent protest in which he and Yoko Ono did not get out of bed for a whole week: first, in March 1969, in room 702 of the Hilton hotel in Amsterdam and two months later, in May, in suite 1742 of the Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal. They were also the glasses he wore in the video for Imagine (released in 1971) and ended up being so distinctive of Lennon that they appeared on the cover of his album Walls and Bridges from 1974 Lennon appeared with multiple lenses, photographed by Bob Gruen.
Thus, those wires were loaded with meaning and became synonymous with ideals hippie, pacifism, youth counterculture and other social issues of the 1970s.
In recent years, some of Lennon’s glasses have been auctioned off (a Briton anonymously paid $2 million in 2007 for a pair of glasses the artist gave away on his tour of Japan in 1966, and an American who served as the Beatles’ chauffeur and assistant, Alan Harring, auctioned off others in 2019 for around €165,000 at Sotheby’s). This is how the pacifist glasses ended up capitalising on their symbolism.