Fashion in movies is often used as a marker for characters, settings, and themes.
One fashion and style piece that has taken on many onscreen forms, shapes, and designs over the years of cinema history is eyewear. Deceptively small in scale and often overlooked, a pair of eyeglasses or fashionable shades can go a long way in solidifying a film's character, intent, and where they're headed in their narrative.
In a piece on 2023 techno-horror "M3gan's" surprising gay sensibility, writer Erik Piepenburg describes the AI cautionary tale as "the gayest non-gay horror film" since 2014's "The Babadook." The piece draws on insights from other writers and critics pinpointing M3gan as a queer icon for her attitude and fashionable nature — psycho robot tendencies aside.
Of course, queerness shouldn't be indicated solely by a character's fashionability, lest we risk falling back onto harmful and dated stereotypes. However, the right choice and use of eyewear can often translate into symbolism and add layers of depth to queer narratives.
Below, we'll take a look at four films and how eyewear plays a role in each case:
Call Me By Your Name
In a previous post highlighting the greatest queer films of all time, Luca Guadanigno's "Call Me By Your Name" makes it among a long line of onscreen LGBT classics like "Priscilla" and "My Own Private Idaho." While eyewear certainly wasn't a focal point of the film, Timothee Chalamet's Elio uses a distinct pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers at crucial points of the film.
Notably, Elio and his older love interest, Oliver, seems to use sunglasses to create emotional distance between each other, wearing shades at earlier scenes in the film. As the two grow closer and become more intimate, the sunglasses get a noticeable reduction in screen time. Aside from being a tool for hiding his emotions, Elio's choice of sunglasses — one of Ray-Ban's most hip and often-updated men's eyeglasses model, the Wayfarer — reflects his youth and innocence, a prominent feature in any coming-of-age piece. In contrast, Oliver wears a tortoiseshell Persol PO0649 in many scenes of the film, showing his age over Elio.
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
We talked about fashionability and queerness in our introduction, but certainly a road trip flick following a group of two drag queens and a trans woman makes fashion an inescapable topic. The film opens with Hugo Weaving, in drag and a shiny sequin dress, lipsyncing to Charlene's 1977 ballad, "I've Never Been to Me." Accompanied by a pink and cursive opening billboard, this gentle and gradually comedic sequence sets the tone for the rest of the film.
While Hugo Weaving's Mitzi del Bra doesn't wear sunglasses in the iconic opening sequence just yet, they do appear at a later focal point of the film. Wearing a fluorescent green sequin dress, Mitzi wears a pair of oval, wire-rimmed sunglasses that look a lot like the Swarovski 0260. Mitzi is practicing her lipsync on the roof their bus, Priscilla, which they had just discovered was coated in homophobic graffiti. The sunglasses are completely overshadowed by the lime-green dress contrasting against muted desert colors, but it's interesting to note that Mitzi wears the sunglasses while not in a wig. Where LGBT characters typically use sunglasses to hide their self or emotions, Mitzi's use of the stylish shades here indicates her off-drag persona, an attempt to still look stylish even without having painted her face.
Tár
Finally, another key use of eyewear in queer film is most recently shown through Todd Field's "Tár," a character study of Lydia Tár, a world-renowned conductor who is unknowingly in a sinister downward spiral after she is accused of misconduct in her work. The film is heavily praised for its taut performances and a sharp script. Meanwhile, subtle elements of horror are peppered throughout the runtime, lurking in the shadows as Tár slips deeper into her downfall.
Instead of wearing sunglasses to hide her feelings or her queerness, however, Lydia Tár is an intimidating woman, an out lesbian who only resorted to sunglasses after an incident in which she slips and hurts her face. Lydia's costuming throughout the film evolves as her narrative progresses, her outfits getting more and more chaotic as her life continues falling apart. When we see her wear the oversized, dark sunglasses and dress in trainers, she is no longer the critically acclaimed conductor everyone fears and respects. Instead of hiding her queerness behind sunglasses, Lydia uses sunglasses in a desperate attempt to disguise weakness — a last-ditch stretch for some ounce of control.
