The other night, I was enjoying dinner at a bistro downtown when two dudes strutted in to scope out the place. They were dressed in comically similar fashion: blazers too tight to button, gym tees, slim jeans, and the type of loafers favored by diamond district wheeler-dealers a little too far to the left on the sleazy-cool spectrum. All of it would’ve been enough to offend my rarified sensibilities, but the aviator sunglasses firmly attached to their faces nearly made me choke on my frites. I downed my glass of Grenache and hightailed it out of there.
Aviator sunglasses were popularized close to a century ago by Bausch and Lomb, the original owner of Ray-Ban. They were developed for US military pilots, who prized their now-signature details—teardrop-shaped lenses that covered a greater field of vision, brow bars that blocked sweat and debris from the eyes, lightweight metal frames that sat comfortably beneath a helmet—as an elegant alternative to the era’s bulky flight goggles.
You can probably guess how the rest of the story goes. After ably serving their country in the skies, aviators gradually made their way back home, and then to Hollywood, where they became a fixture on box-office juggernauts like Tom Cruise—who sent sales of Ray-Ban aviators skyrocketing with the release of Top Gun in the ’80s, and did it again in the 2020s—and regular dudes looking to jack their swagger. At certain points along that journey, aviators were alternatively classic, functional, and cool. Today, though, I’m here to tell you that they’re goofy as hell.
First, to state the obvious: you are not Tom Cruise. But there’s something about aviators that tricks scores of swagless men into thinking that they could be. Aviators seem to have the peculiar effect of convincing total cornballs that they’re one pair of sunglasses away from unlocking hitherto-unknown levels of pure aura, of Maverick-like sex appeal, of unadulterated machismo, leaving them intimidating yet irresistible in their too-small henleys, too-big watches, and too-stretchy chinos.
They’re the go-to shades for dudes who think they’re really doing something, the default gag for groomsmen cosplaying as the security detail for their former-college-roommate groom. If the extremely hot professional models plastered across the walls of your local Sunglass Hut (who, again, are not Tom Cruise) can’t make aviators look cool, what chance do the rest of us have?
I should mention an important caveat. The aviators I find the most offensive, the ones that nearly soured my appetite the other evening, share a few specific flourishes—dinky metal frames, tinted green lenses, underwhelming brow bars. There are aviators that look better than them, ones that don’t squander so much real estate on your face, or smoothen that teardrop shape with squarer lenses, or do away with the vestigial brow bar entirely. A chunkier riff on the silhouette with vibier tinted lenses can telegraph the exact opposite of the narc energy I’m railing against—think Tom Ford at the height of his Gucci era, Elton John at his most glam, or Paul Newman in Persols on any mood board ever.
I’m sure there are Average Joes who can pull off those green-lensed, gold-plated, teardrop-shaped monstrosities, and plenty more who will spam me shortly, insisting that they can. I’m always eager to be proven wrong. But for most of us, it’s time to salute those aviators for their service, and ground them indefinitely.
