Women wear the style, but it has a particularly masculine appeal. “The aviator has a butch quality that few other sunglasses can match,” Financial Times style columnist Nicholas Foulkes wrote in 2002. Those associations haven’t changed much in the intervening years. In surveys in the 1980s, Ray-Ban found that “macho” and “American” were the words most often associated with its Aviator shades. Douglas MacArthur, who was photographed wearing them as he waded ashore the island of Leyte in 1944, fulfilling his promise to return in victory to the Philippines. After the war, civilians adopted the style, which was in plentiful supply thanks to military surplus stores.Īviators remain permanently imbued with the aura of Gen. The sunglasses became iconic in World War II, when they were worn by soldiers and sailors as well as airmen. (Contrary to popular belief, the first versions were made by American Optical, founded in 1833 and still in business, not Ray-Ban.) The slightly curved, teardrop shape blocks peripheral glare. Army Air Corps commissioned them for pilots. For the 80-year-old president, whose age makes even partisan Democrats nervous, the sunglasses offer a reminder that classics go in and out of fashion but never disappear.Īviator sunglasses date back to the 1930s, when the U.S. His 2020 campaign created a “Team Joe Aviators” Instagram filter to let supporters put the glasses on their own photos. The first photo posted on his vice presidential Instagram account in 2014 was a close-up of Ray-Ban Aviators posed on his desk. Aviators are for bad boys who want to do good.īiden and his team have gone to great pains to make the iconic lenses a central element of his personal brand. The shades are Biden’s signature accessory, the embodiment of American swagger. His catchphrase, repeated throughout his debates with Donald Trump, is an Everyman expression of incredulity. The stripes, lifted from Biden’s campaign logos, evoke the American flag. It was Joe Biden in a graphical nutshell. On a bright blue background, a stylized image of black aviator sunglasses sat above the phrase, “COME ON, MAN!!” in white, with the E represented as three red stripes. In February, as I walked past a drugstore display rack, a greeting card caught my eye.
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