Mid2Mod: cateye glasses

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Back in the day: Crazy about cateyes

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, females of every age had to have cateye glasses. Who could resist those almond-shaped beauties that made us feel as glamorous as the movie stars we saw wearing them in magazines and in the movies?

I started wearing glasses in 1961 when I was in the 8th grade, and the first ones I had were black cateyes, with a small silver metal design in the corner...not too flashy, not too grown-up, but cateyes nonetheless. My grandmother Mimi, always the glitz girl, had a gold metal pair that had a row of large rhinestones at the top of the upswept frame. Even my mother, never the fashionista, had to have some...albeit a conservative tortoiseshell pair with no ornamentation.

After all, even the most practical among us secretly wanted to look like Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn.